


Standing On The Borderline

by LayALioness



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Minor Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-10-06 02:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10323806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LayALioness/pseuds/LayALioness
Summary: Raven eyes the truck a little. The engine is still on and it’s vibrating as it sits, roaring on the side of the road. “Looks like you could use a mechanic,” she says. “How far are you trying to take it?”“West coast,” the driver says, purposefully vague, which suits Raven just fine.“That’s where I’m headed too. If you do the driving, I’ll make sure we get there.”The driver eyes her a little closer, studying up and down, and Raven fidgets, swallowing the urge to bark what are you looking at? She knows what she must look like; greasy hair that hasn’t been washed in days, thrown up in a messy tangled ponytail, rumpled sweat-soaked clothes, boots caked in Midwest dust, old fraying bag tossed over one shoulder, the crude metal brace strapped over her knee. She looks like a homeless person, or a runaway. A Lifetime movie in the making.She looks like baggage, the extra kind that nobody wants to carry home.The driver leans over, and pops the lock on the passenger door. It feels more like a gesture than anything else; Raven could have easily reached in through the window and done it herself.





	

**Author's Note:**

> ok so I posted this before and then deleted it because I expanded the idea into a novella which I then published, but this is the unedited original fanwork and there's such a lack of Luna x Raven-centric fics, so here you go! title from "the feeling"
> 
> also here's an 8tracks playlist that goes with this: http://8tracks.com/tierannasaurusrex/ocean-waves-falling-stars

Raven doesn’t set out to hitchhike across the country. She isn’t really sure what she sets out to do--isn’t sure where exactly she’s going, before she’s made it halfway across the Midwest and realizes there’s only really one place she can go. And since she doesn’t have her license anymore, there’s only really one way to get there. 

The bus stops somewhere in Missouri. At least, she thinks it’s Missouri. It’s one of those big, forgotten states filled with hay bales the size of cars and corn. She fell asleep sometime in Kentucky, because she can only take so much farm country and backwoods towns that look like the sets of the creepiest  _ Criminal Minds _ episodes, and because the old woman next to her on the bus is a Chatty Cathy and Raven can only handle so much smalltalk, too. 

She sleeps with her face pressed to the cold glass of the window pane, and only wakes up when the bus groans to a stop with the sound of something very old and long-suffering. Everything smells like sweat, and exhaust, and a little bit like urine. The gas station is old enough that there aren’t any card readers at the gas pumps, and the bathroom is a stand-alone outhouse around the back. 

Raven squeezes her way past the old woman, who promises to watch over her seat diligently, and breathes in the rusty-hot air outside. 

The cashier is a thin-faced teenager, probably fresh out of high school, if he graduated at all, picking at a scab on the knuckle of his thumb when she walks in.

“Bathroom?” She tries to ration out her words, these days, leaving her voice strange-sounding and hoarse. He shrugs a single shoulder towards the west end of the building, and hands over a block of wood covered in banana stickers and penises doodled in dry erase marker. A cheap metal chain is drilled into the end, with a dangling key. 

The bathroom itself isn’t as bad as she’s expecting--in that, she’s not totally sure she’ll get chlamydia from the toilet seat. Herpes, maybe. Definitely crabs, but at least nothing too serious. Besides, she doesn’t even actually have to go. She just needs the four-minute sanctuary a gas station bathroom might provide, stuffy and stale and grime-stained as it may be. It’ll do.

She maybe shouldn’t touch the sink, lined with brown spirals like the rings of a tree, but more disgusting. The mirror is permanently fogged with age, but she looks at it anyway, brushing the tangled strands of hair from her face and sweat-slicked neck, pulling it all up into a gnarled ponytail. She frowns back at herself.

“What the fuck,” she says, because apparently that’s where she is in life; swearing at her own reflection in a port-a-potty petri dish.

There are bruises under her eyes, and beyond the cat nap she just took for the last couple of hours, Raven can’t remember the last time she actually  _ really _ slept. She thinks it was somewhere in Memphis, at the Holiday Inn that gave her fleas. She feels like someone flipped a switch inside her, putting her on auto-pilot. She’s felt like that ever since she left DC.

It wasn’t the worst breakup she’s ever had--Finn still holds the title for that one--but it is the first one that’s left Raven thinking she might have been the one in the wrong. She closes her eyes and sees Gina’s face crumpling and yeah, Raven was definitely the asshole.

But even now, she tries to imagine the future Gina wanted; a white wedding, 2.5 kids, some house in the suburbs with sunflowers in the front garden, and Raven’s stomach starts to churn like she’s about to throw up that picture-perfect gentrified fantasy all over the sticky tile floor. At least there’s a toilet just a few inches away.

The worst of it is, Raven isn’t sure she’s allowed to feel sad. It’s her fault, after all. isn’t it? She’s the reason she left, shoving clothes into old plastic Food Lion bags because she didn’t want to wait until morning, to buy a suitcase first. She’s the reason Gina locked herself in the bathroom to cry. 

It’s a new sensation for Raven, the breakup-guilt. The itch that makes her want to pick at her nails or braid and unbraid her hair over and over, just to give her hands something to do. Maybe she could unlace her sneakers and make bracelets out of the cord. Maybe she could make a noose.

_ “I can’t do this again,” _ Gina said, and Raven had just stared. Raven always knew what to say, always had a comeback, some snarky one-liner to make everyone laugh--but as her girlfriend-- _ ex-girlfriend _ \--stared at her from across the mattress, looking cut open and raw, for once she had nothing. She just stared, like an  _ asshole _ .  _ “I can’t just keep waiting for you to want me as much as I want you. I deserve more than that. I can’t--I already went through it with Bellamy. I can’t with you, too.” _

_ “I want you,”  _ Raven said, but it sounded stupid even to her. Hollow. Because that wasn’t what Gina meant, and they both knew it.

_ “I want someone who wants to spend the rest of their life with me,”  _ Gina said.  _ “And you don’t.” _

Raven started to feel that familiar nausea that came with thoughts of the future, and by the way Gina grimaced, she could tell.  _ “I want to spend right now with you,”  _ Raven tried.  _ “Why isn’t that enough?” _

Gina started to cry. She was still wearing that day’s makeup, cheap and not waterproof, so streaks of charcoal leaked down her cheeks in rivers.  _ “It’s just not.” _

Raven left that night, even though Gina said she didn’t have to. Gina would have probably let Raven stay as long as she needed to, until she found a new apartment, or checked into a hotel. Gina might have even been the one to take the couch, but Raven didn’t care. Gina was wrong; she did have to leave, and she needed to leave immediately. She was being strangled by that picket fence.

Raven doesn’t date, not really. Not like Clarke, and Bellamy, and everyone else seems to. There was Finn for most of her life, absorbing her whole world up until he was everything. And then one day he wasn’t, and everything around her collapsed and she had to rebuild her universe piece by piece. She and Clarke got drunk on some old expensive whiskey Clarke stole from her dad’s old office, and Raven still sort of hated her back then, still got that bitter aftertaste in her mouth whenever she saw Clarke’s perfect blonde hair and blue eyes and pale skin--but Raven also made a point to never drink alone. 

After that, there was Wick, shortsighted and short-lived. Clarke was gone by then, but Bellamy was still around, and there was  _ Gina _ .  _ Gina _ , with her perfect frizzy curls and her perfect half-smile and the little bar tricks she used to do, to cheer Raven up. When she kissed her, it lit Raven up from the inside out, all the way from her toes to her hairline and she thought  _ this is it _ .

But it wasn’t. Nothing lasts forever, not even electric kisses that taste like tequila sunrise, and Raven knows that better than most. That’s why she’s here, glaring back at her reflection like a dare.  _ I dare you to open up. I dare you to smile. I dare you to move. I dare you to do  _ something. 

Raven’s reflection blinks at her. She sighs, splashing water across her face. It smells like rotten eggs, and tastes like metal.

When she walks back around the store to return the wooden block-key, Raven finds the parking lot is empty. The bus is gone. She stares at the space where it was sitting, in shock, and then looks out over the fields around the station. There isn’t even a cloud of dust kicked up from the dirt road, to show her where the greyhound went. It’s just... _ gone _ .

Without many other options, Raven goes inside. There’s an oscillating fan that doesn’t seem to be able to oscillate, groaning away in the corner, but she hardly feels the breeze. She sets the block down on the counter maybe a little more harsh than is absolutely necessary, and growls at the cashier.

“Where did the bus go?”

The teenager stares back at her, clearly thrown. “Uh, away?” he tries, and Raven swallows a scream.

But the thing about screams is sometimes they escape anyway. Sometimes they demand to be let out, and so she storms outside and yells out at nothing in particular, just to yell. It doesn’t make her feel better.

She thinks back to the old woman on the bus. “Thanks for nothing,” she grumbles, kicking at some loose bits of gravel in the crumbling parking lot. “Okay,” she reaches up to rub at her forehead, already starting to drip stinging sweat into her eyes in the August heat. “Get it together, Reyes,” she tells herself. She talks to herself now; she’s decided to just go with it. “You always have a Plan B.”

Raven Reyes has a history with Plan B’s. She was always the person that everyone went to, when they had nowhere else to go. When they had tried everything, Raven was their final fail-safe. She was hired by the government for her Plan B’s. Her Plan B’s had helped get people to Mars. Raven was in the business of knowing what to do when everything went wrong.

But that was Raven from six months ago, before the accident. Before she became just some bum with a busted leg, living off disability. At least her fancy government job had good healthcare.

Now between the stress and the heat and maybe the slight possibility of rain, her leg is starting to ache where her brace is latched over the top of her blue jeans. Raven lowers herself to the curb, slowly, stretching out her injured leg first before settling in with the rest of her. She tips her head back and squints up at the sky, a pale summer yellow, with no shred of blue at all. Maybe this is what the sky looks like in the Midwest. Maybe, like how the usual blue is simply a reflection of water, this sky is reflecting back all the acres of corn surrounding her. Gnats start to buzz around Raven’s nose, and she swats them away. “Fuck,” she says, to no one. Or maybe everyone. She wonders how long she has to be out in the sun before she gets heat stroke. She’s not sure the threat is worth moving for. 

Raven empties her pockets and the cloth backpack she has slung over one shoulder, and comes up with a handful of clothes that she’d managed to fit in the bag; a dozen receipts from different gas stations and truck stops, most of them for cheap vending machine coffee and those little packets of six powdered donuts; the tiny bottles of shampoo she stole from the Holiday Inn; some mini bottles of tequila that she also stole from the Holiday Inn; and roughly thirty bucks in crumpled dollar bills and spare change. She’d spent almost all her money on the bus ticket, and her latest disability check is probably lying on the coffee table back in DC, while Gina waits for her to call her back. 

“Fuck,” she says again, for good measure. The rest of her clothes are still on the bus, most likely lost to her forever, which only sours her mood even more. All of her most expensive underwear is probably being divvied up by whoever found her unclaimed Food Lion bags, tucked under the seat. 

The cashier’s friend, who looks roughly his age and somehow much skinnier, shows up at some point and they come sit by her on the curb, chain-smoking a pack of Pall Malls that she’s pretty sure they aren’t old enough to legally smoke. 

“Heard you got left behind by your crew,” the friend says, trying to blow a smoke ring. Raven ignores him, wondering how long it might take her to hitchhike to California.

The first ride she hitches is with a middle-aged housewife-looking woman in a wooden plated station wagon, because she looks like a PTA member, and Raven’s pretty sure that even if she does try to kill her, Raven would probably be able to take her in a fight. 

There are two kids tucked into the backseat, playing some version of Go Fish that doesn’t involve a lot of cards, since most of them are scattered along the ground. The little girl hands two over to Raven, so she can play as well, twisting herself so she can see over the passenger seat.

She drives with them to Topeka, where they’re visiting the kids’ grandmother. They stop at a couple of drive-thru’s on the way, and the woman insists on buying Raven a big mac. 

“You’re skin and bones,” she says, ending the argument, even as Raven holds out her quarters. She shrugs, slipping the coins back into her pocket. If she doesn’t have to pay, she won’t.

Kansas is everything that  _ The Wizard of Oz _ had promised, but with a lot more neon lights than there probably were in 1939. The housewife puts on some audio book version of a Harlequin romance book and Raven starts to refer to her as Lois, in her head.

After Lois, there’s Frank, which is his actual real name that he introduces himself with, and he picks her up at a truck stop. He’s driving a semi, but without the trailer hitch on the back; it’s just the front half, and Raven’s honestly a little worried about going anywhere in it. It looks like a decapitated head. But Frank’s nice enough, if a little racist in that way that most old white people are, and has a polaroid of him and his nice-looking husband Gerald, stuck up in his sun visor. And Raven still has quite a few states to get through; it’s not like she’s at the point where she can be  _ picky _ .

Frank takes her through the rest of Kansas and just into Colorado Springs, before dropping her off at some pit stop diner around five in the morning.

She orders some burnt coffee and watery eggs, and the sun is leaking up over the horizon when she starts marching her way down route 65, waiting for some passing soccer mom to take pity on her.

Except the next car that pulls over isn’t a wood paneled minivan or safety-rated SUV. It’s a truck. 

Specifically, it’s an  _ old _ truck, and looks ready to give out at any second. Raven can’t believe it’s still moving at all. It looks like someone parked it out in the woods somewhere and left it to be reclaimed by the forest, or something. 

The driver slows down and stops, half-on the highway’s shoulder and half-on the dirt, so Raven can jog over to the open passenger window.

"Think you could give me a lift?" Raven asks. The driver looks like she's thinking it over.

"Why should I?" She’s pretty in a way that’s difficult to describe; like a model in some fantasy-themed spread in a fashion magazine, with dark hair that defies gravity, and feathers tangled up in the curls. She’s smoking something that isn’t a cigarette, longer and thinner and sweeter-smelling. Even though it must be eighty degrees out, she’s wearing a jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. It looks like the kind of jacket that she stole from an older brother or an old boyfriend or a thrift store. Like it used to belong to someone else, before it was hers.

Raven eyes the truck a little. The engine is still on and it’s vibrating as it sits, roaring on the side of the road. "Looks like you could use a mechanic," she says. “How far are you trying to take it?”

“West coast,” the driver says, purposefully vague, which suits Raven just fine.

“That’s where I’m headed too. If you do the driving, I’ll make sure we get there.”

The driver eyes her a little closer, studying up and down, and Raven fidgets, swallowing the urge to bark  _ what are you looking at? _ She knows what she must look like; greasy hair that hasn’t been washed in days, thrown up in a messy tangled ponytail, rumpled sweat-soaked clothes, boots caked in Midwest dust, old fraying bag tossed over one shoulder, the crude metal brace strapped over her knee. She looks like a homeless person, or a runaway. A Lifetime movie in the making.

She looks like baggage, the extra kind that nobody wants to carry home.

The driver leans over, and pops the lock on the passenger door. It feels more like a gesture than anything else; Raven could have easily reached in through the window and done it herself.

“Hop in,” she says, and Raven does. “I’m Luna.”

“Raven,” she has to slam the door hard, to get it to latch shut, and then Luna shifts gears, and rumbles back onto the highway. The radio is on but turned down low, so Raven can barely make out some country song she doesn’t recognize. Raven isn’t much of a smalltalk person, but she is a car-talk person, and she can’t help her curiosity. She knows it’s a Chevy, but it’s hard to tell much else. It’s more rust than anything, but she thinks it might have once been blue. “How old is this thing, anyway?”

Luna smiles to herself, like a proud mom, with one of those Honors Student bumper stickers. “Sixty-six years,” she says, and Raven lets out a low whistle. “Right? I don’t think it looks a day over fifty.”

It’s hard not to laugh at that. The truck could easily be a century old, and Raven isn’t sure the average person would know the difference. 

Luna doesn’t seem bothered, though, or interested in conversation the way Lois and Frank were, which is fine. Raven doesn’t have much to say.

The truck doesn’t break down until Grand Junction, as the sun is setting on Colorado. The air around them is cool and the violet-blue of dusk, as Luna peels off the highway to park by a billboard proclaiming the miracle of childbirth. Raven isn’t really sure what it’s advertising, besides an infant with a turnip-shaped head.

“Do you have a toolkit?” Raven asks, hopping out of the truck. Luna, for what it’s worth, seems entirely undisturbed by the fact that her truck burped an enormous amount of smoke and then continued to whine and grumble its way off the road.

“In the bed,” she says, leading Raven around. 

She has the usual suspects: a set of sockets and screwdrivers, some extra hose clamps, jumper cables, a tow strap, a tire pressure gauge, a can of fix-a-flat, a couple of ice scrapers, one of those aluminum windshield covers, a heavy-duty Maglite, a lug wrench, the smallest car jack Raven’s ever seen, an a well-used roll of duct tape. It looks like Luna just walked into Home Depot and asked for the most comprehensive vehicle toolkit they had.

Raven grabs the flashlight and duct tape to start with, and heads back around to pop the hood. She shines the light and stares down at the engine, covered in patches of duct tape like a quilt. “I take it this happens pretty often?”

Luna shrugs. “I usually just check the oil, and then tape up whatever part seems smokiest. After that, it runs fine.”

“Just a pro-tip,” Raven says, stuffing the flashlight into her mouth so both her hands are free. “Constantly breaking down does not equal  _ it runs fine _ .” 

Her best guess is a flooded carburetor, which means a drained battery. She’d prefer having an actual garage, to take the engine apart and study it in, before putting it all back together. But she’ll work with what she’s got, which is a flashlight and some duct tape on the side of the road at night.

Raven’s always loved working with engines and motors and other puzzle-like things. Things that worked when you put them together a certain way, and didn’t work when you didn’t. Things that had a straight answer, or cure, or method. Math and science always made so much more sense than metaphors and  _ art _ . She liked knowing that a problem was solvable, so long as she knew the equation. And she liked always having something to do with her hands.

Luna leans against the door of the cab while Raven works. She lights up another of her strange, sweet-smelling cigarettes and tips her head back, to look at the stars. Raven can’t help watching her, silhouetted by the flashlight’s beam. She wonders if the cigarette tastes like blackberry, the way it smells.

She thinks about Gina, who’d hated smoking. She thought it was a disgusting habit, used to call it  _ suicide for idiots _ . Raven had never really cared much either way, and had certainly never seen the appeal. When they were kids, Finn tried it. He kept up the habit long enough to smoke through a whole pack, but they were expensive, and so he gave it up fairly quickly. She remembers the way he tasted, though, like an ashtray, and Raven hadn’t  _ minded _ , but she didn’t like the smell of his Marlboro’s. 

She thinks about Bellamy. Had he ever smoked? She can’t remember. Clarke, maybe, if only to rebel against her mother the doctor. Raven had tried one of Finn’s, once, but it made her eyes water and her throat burn, so she couldn’t even finish it. 

Raven finishes patching up the machine as best she can, and swings up behind the wheel, flooring the gas pedal to empty the carburetor before Luna tries to turn it back on. She slides over across the bench seat, and Luna climbs inside. The engine turns over with a groan, and the truck flickers to life. It’s dark, but Raven sees the smile Luna flashes, before she pulls back onto the highway.

By the time they’ve reached Utah, Raven’s grown sick of country, and after a few minutes spent twisting each dial every which way, she’s discovered that the radio apparently only plays one station. 

“It grows on you,” Luna shrugs, and Raven scoffs, turning back to the window. Her leg’s starting to ache, from being bent for so long, but she isn’t willing to ask to pull over. She’ll give it another hour. She can take a little soreness.

But then Luna’s flicking on her blinker, and pulling onto the exit. “I’m hungry,” she says, rolling lazily into the parking lot of some diner that looks like it’ll give them both food poisoning.

She makes a point of locking both doors before they walk in, and pick a booth in the back, where the menus double as place mats, sticky on the table. 

Luna orders breakfast food even though it’s nearly ten at night, a stack of pancakes with syrup made of pralines, and Raven gets a burger that leaks special sauce through her fingers and burns the roof of her mouth. She washes it down with cherry coke, and Luna sips on sweet tea with so much sugar in it that it doesn’t all dissolve, forming a layer of sludge at the bottom that she swirls around with her straw.

“I’ll trade you a fry for some hashbrowns,” Raven offers. 

“I’ll trade you some hash browns for a secret,” Luna says, and there’s something in her eyes that makes Raven feel nervous.

Raven makes a point to never feel nervous. 

Part of her wants to tell her to fuck off. She doesn’t know this girl; what right does she have, demanding something like  _ secrets _ from her?

There’s another part that whispers  _ she  _ did _ agree to take us all the way to California _ . Raven ignores that part.

The rest of her just lights up, all neon and argon inside. She’s never backed down from a dare, and that’s exactly what this feels like.

“Fine.” She scoops up a forkful of greasy potato shreds, from Luna’s plate. “I’m an orphan.” She swallows the hashbrowns in one bite. “Your turn.”

“I’m also an orphan,” Luna says, plucking a single fry, and popping it into her mouth. “My brother and I grew up in a group home.”

Raven takes another bite of hash browns, not to be outdone. “My foster mom tried to get me to prostitute myself. Beat that.”

Luna raises a single brow, but she looks more amused than anything else. She grabs the glass ketchup bottle and pours some onto her plate; a show of confidence. “I was engaged to be married, once.” She takes a fry.

“My boyfriend of nine years cheated on me with my best friend’s now-wife,” Raven shoots, shielding the rest of her fries. She’s definitely winning this.

“My fiance died in a robbery,” Luna says grimly, and takes two fries this time, swiping them through the ketchup first, staining her mouth sugary red.

Raven sighs, pushing her plate towards the middle of the table, so they can share the rest of the fries. “You win.” There’s no way to trump a murdered fiance, she’s pretty sure. Not without being even more of an asshole than she usually is. Finn died in a freak work accident, and that carved her open for reasons that aren’t easy to say in a fly-infested diner, to a stranger she hardly even knows.

It amazes her, a little, that she was willing to divulge even this much, to someone she just met a few hours ago. She only knows her first name, and isn’t even sure if that’s true or not. It’s not like she saw any proof of identity, or anything. And Raven’s never liked smalltalk, to begin with. 

Except that’s the thing--it wasn’t smalltalk, was it? Smalltalk is  _ so how’s the weather? How’s your mom? I like your shoes. How about those sports teams?  _ It’s safe, it’s universal, it’s  _ boring _ . 

It certainly isn’t swapping tragic backstories for under-salted french fries in a cracked vinyl booth. Raven kind of likes swapping tragic backstories. At the very least, it’s interesting. 

“Why California?” Luna asks, nudging what’s left of her hash browns over, as an offering. A draw.

Raven thinks about not answering; the competition is over, after all, but Luna smirks a little.

“Oh, come on. It can’t be any worse than a foster mother trying to pimp you out.”

“Remember that friend I mentioned? The one that married the girl my boyfriend cheated on my with? They live in Sacramento. I’m going to stay with them for a while.”

Luna hums, but says nothing.

“What about you? Why California?”

Luna finishes the last of the fries and licks the grease from her fingers one by one, as Raven tracks the movement. Her hands are long, longer than Raven’s, impossibly quick and just a shade paler. “Why not?” Luna asks, and Raven makes a face.

“That’s cheating.”

“Who said there were any rules?” Before she can respond, Luna leaves to go pay the check at the register. She doesn’t ask Raven to split the amount, and Raven glimpses a collection of what looks like all twenty dollar bills in Luna’s wallet. There must be at least a thousand bucks in there.

It is possible, she knows that the girl she managed to hitch a ride with could be a contract killer, or white collar criminal or something. Hell, she could be completely insane-- _ kill-her-own-mother-and-eat-her-own-organs-insane _ . Not just regular, talk-to-yourself-in-mirrors-and-wake-up-screaming-every-night-insane. Raven’s not about to judge anyone for that.

She thinks about asking after the money in Luna’s jacket pocket, but Luna doesn’t seem to want a conversation, and they’re out of fried food, so the question simmers on Raven’s tongue as they head back to the highway. Some guy from Nashville croons lowly through the speakers and she ignores him.

“So do you drive this way a lot?” Raven asks, and Luna glances at her in the rear view mirror, confused. “You don’t have a GPS, or map. I figured you must have the route memorized.”

Luna shrugs, both hands on the steering wheel, perfectly at ten-and-two. “If I just keep going west, we’re bound to hit the coast eventually,” she says, which seems both like a fool-proof plan, and an idiotic one. Raven doesn’t really like plans that don’t involve maps or instructions. 

“So you don’t actually have any directions?” 

“West is a direction,” Luna says, and Raven scoffs, leaning her head back against the cloth headrest, and closing her eyes. It’s dark inside the truck, and even darker outside, even with the truck’s foggy headlights on. The glass is old, with that smoky film that comes from age, dimming the beams.

They drive for a couple more hours; Raven’s phone dies halfway through, in the middle of a round of fruit ninja, and she only has a wall charger in her bag. Her eyes are starting to slide shut when Luna starts to turn off of an exit again. 

They don’t stop at a Holiday Inn, but instead at some unknown motel that could double as a _ Bates Motel _ clone. The VACANCY sign flickers out at her like a bad idea. 

“Seriously?” she asks Luna, as she parks the truck. “You want to stay  _ here _ ? At Murders R Us?” 

Luna ignores her, hopping out of the truck with no hesitance. “You can sleep in the truck, if you want. Personally, I need something with a little more lumbar support, and with any luck some wifi.”

Raven had sort of just assumed, based on the truck and Luna’s very  _ nineties throwback _ fashion sense, that she must be some sort of anti-technology Luddite, but apparently not. She gave the truck bed one last consideration, before heaving herself out onto the pavement, and following her inside.

Luna rents a room with two beds from a man who looks surprisingly normal for a motel this creepy, and Raven follows her out along the side of the building, to their door.

“Did you want to split the cost?” Raven asks, because it’s shitty if she doesn’t at least offer, right? So far she hasn’t had to pay for any gas or food. At some point, it becomes less like accepting charity and more like taking advantage.

But Luna shakes her head as she unlocks the door. “I know you noticed already, but I’m not exactly wanting for money. And I doubt you have much, judging by how little you packed for a cross-country trip.”

“I lost all my shit on a bus,” Raven admits and Luna nods, like she’d guessed as much. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she tells her. “I’m going to take a shower.” She disappears into the connected bathroom, and Raven falls onto her bed.

There’s an old satellite TV, and Raven channel surfs until she finds a Law & Order: SVU marathon. She can hear the running water from Luna’s shower, and tries to not let it distract her, but she’s seen this episode. Her hands need something to do, so she fiddles with her leg brace, pulling it off bit by bit so she can finally peel the sweat-sticky denim from her skin. It’s slow-going; she’s still clumsy around her bad leg, and it’s been what? Two days since she was able to take the brace off? Three times longer than she’s supposed to go, but she knows Bellamy once wore the same pair of month-long contacts for half a year before throwing them out, so it can’t be  _ that _ bad.

She’s still half naked when she hears the shower cut off, and she can’t pull the shorts from her bag quick enough, before Luna walks into the room wearing some silky short robe. It’s a dark green color, like the ocean.

Raven just stands there, staring, and Luna stares back for a moment before crossing over to her bag on the other side of the room, like nothing has happened. Raven hops on her good leg, and pulls her shorts on, before collapsing back on the mattress in a huff.

“Your turn,” Luna says, gesturing towards the bathroom as she spreads some sweet-smelling lotion on her legs. It reminds Raven of the beach. “If you want.”

Raven makes a face. She really should shower; she’s been sweating in the same old clothes for two days, and her hair is starting to feel gross. She remembers going backpacking through Central America one summer, with a bunch of engineering majors from her University. They didn’t shower for two weeks, and it actually made her feel freer, somehow. Now traveling just makes her feel tired, and grumpy, and disgusting, and she can’t wait for the trips to end.

Except for this one. When this trip ends, she’ll have to face Bellamy and Clarke. She’ll have to  _ talk _ about it, and tell them what happened, at the very least. She’ll have to figure out where she’s going to go next, and what she’s going to  _ do _ . She’ll have to change her address, so she can get the disability checks. She’ll have to call Gina, about the apartment, and all the things she left behind. The life she left behind.

Raven doesn’t want to think about that. “Yeah, a shower sounds great.”

The brace is only for long-term relief and stabilization; Raven can still walk short distances, and stand while leaning against something. But that doesn’t make it easy. She gathers up the little shampoos and soap bars that she’s now glad she’d had the foresight to steal, and limps her way to the bathroom. 

She’s never been able to take cold showers, even in the hottest desert weather, so the water is lukewarm down her back, soothing the muscles there, and the sore ache in her leg. Raven takes extra time on her hair, using up two of the little miniature conditioners, combing her fingers through the knots. She thinks back to her last shower, before the impromptu trip. It was the morning of the break-up, hours before, when she’d just woken up. She’d just turned the water on, when Gina came up behind her, smoothing her hands over Raven’s breasts, helping her wash her feet. They had sex, and then Gina went to work, and then she came home, and everything fell apart.

Raven gets herself off now, fast and rough, just like a good round of breakup sex, if she had someone to do that with. 

_ There’s someone right outside _ , she thinks, or part of her thinks.  _ You could ask her to join you. _

“Shut up,” Raven growls, and comes over her own fingers, with Luna’s bare legs and that silk gown still stretched across her brain, because her mind is a traitor. 

_ She might have touched herself in here too. She might have been thinking about you. _

“Stop,” Raven closes her eyes and presses her cheek to the cold tile. The water’s starting to run cold, and her knee is starting to hurt again. It’s a constant pain,  _ chronic _ , they call it. Sometimes she even forgets it’s there, forgets to feel it, but it’s never gone.

_ You’re going to dream about it again tonight, and you’re going to scream and wake her up and then she’ll know you’re fucked in the head and she’ll leave you behind, just like the bus. Just like Finn and Bellamy and Clarke and everyone. _

“Shut  _ the fuck up _ ,” Raven grumbles, shutting off the faucet, and fighting her way out of the coffin-narrow stall.

She swipes a wet hand over her foggy reflection, but it’s hard to see much of anything in the watery mirror. Brown skin, tired eyes, dark hair. It’s not surprising; there wasn’t much to begin with.

What frustrates her the most--alright, maybe not the  _ most _ , but certainly more than a lot of other things--is the fact that she remembers being happy. She remembers being confident, in herself and her abilities. She remembers being strong, being the one that everyone could count on. She remembers always getting first place, always getting picked first for the team, always coming out on top. She remembers what that feels like, and she looks in the streaky mirror and she doesn’t know who she sees but it isn’t that girl, anymore. 

Raven towels off and pulls on her clothes in a rush. She doesn’t look at the mirror again.

Luna is draped over her bed like a water spill, watching the screen without actually seeing it. Raven flicks the TV off, and Luna’s eyes fall shut.

Raven thought the anxiety of her recurring nightmares might keep her up longer, but she falls asleep so quickly she doesn’t remember doing it. And then she’s in the car again, and it’s skidding on the ice and then it’s turning and turning and she opens her mouth to scream but nothing comes out, even though her throat is burning. She rams into the road guard and thinks  _ this is it, this will stop it, this will save me _ . But it doesn’t. The car rolls over the road guard, and now she’s falling down towards the water in a nose dive, like a bullet breaking the surface and everything is dark.

_ This is what dying feels like _ , she thinks, and then she wakes up.

Luna is hovering over her, looking unsure with her damp curls a wild net around them both, one knee dipping the mattress and the other stretched on the floor. Raven is gasping, like she just ran a 5k, and she stares up at Luna with wide eyes, still adjusting to the conscious world.

“You were screaming,” Luna explains, sitting back with her leg tucked under her, just inches away so Raven could touch her if she tried.

“Yeah,” she says, swallowing, trying to steady her breathing, slow down her heart rate. It feels like a rabbit inside her chest, like it’s looking for a getaway. “I do that, sometimes.”

_ Sometimes _ , she thinks, because she can’t just give herself a break.  _ What a joke _ . She’s woken up screaming every night since the accident. PTSD. The word makes her feel a dozen different shades of rotten; PTSD is what soldiers come home with, after they’ve been shot at, and seen their friends killed. It’s what the survivors of school shootings and bank robberies and rape have. Not shitty drivers who roll off the ice. 

She went to a few support group meetings, after some sleepless nights and reassurances from Gina. She listened to the stories--Kabul, Fallujah, Baghdad. Rape, robberies, home invasions, gang shootings--and each time they asked her to share hers, Raven wanted to swallow her own tongue. What was she supposed to tell them?  _ Sorry you all got attacked and nearly killed; I was too tired to drive and I slipped on some ice and went over the road guard, like an idiot.  _ She couldn’t say that, and so she didn’t say anything, and she stopped going to meetings.

Luna doesn’t ask any of the usual questions--why were you screaming? What were you dreaming about? Are you alright? Do you want to talk about it? Instead she asks “Do you need anything? A glass of water?”

Raven stares at her, faintly lit up in electric violet by the neon VACANCY sign, still flickering just outside their window. “Water?”

“Sleep dehydrates you,” Luna tells her, and goes over to fill one of the little plastic cups from the tap, and brings it back.

Raven gulps it down, thirstier than she realized, and Luna sets the empty cup down on the bedside table, beside the Book of Mormon. “Goodnight.” She goes back to her own bed, and stretches out on top of the sheets, basking like a cat in the heat. Raven watches her for a moment in the blinking light, before rolling over to face the pinstriped wallpaper. 

_ Don’t think about the water _ , she tells herself. She never listens.

If Luna is still thinking about Raven’s midnight screaming session when they wake up in the morning, she doesn’t say. Raven packs their bags in the truck while Luna checks them out at the front desk, and then she’s back behind the wheel in a pair of harem pants and beaded sandals, like she’s on her way to some farmer’s market, rather than across two whole states. 

This time, the truck breaks down sometime in the mid-morning, and Raven welcomes the break, taking a few moments to stretch out her leg before she pops the hood open. She patches it up and gets it running, only for the engine to start smoking again two hours later. 

After their fourth pit stop, she glares down at the smoking engine, in distaste. At this rate, they’d be lucky to make it to California by the end of the week.

“Let’s just park it and see the sights,” Luna suggests, unconcerned with her truck’s terrible state. “Everything needs a break, sometime.” She pats the hood of her truck, and starts over towards the fruit stand a few yards away. There’s an old man and what looks like his three granddaughters, selling apricots and figs by the bushel. 

“Do you happen to have any sweet tea?” Luna asks, sounding charming, and Raven stares as one of the little girls pulls a water cooler out from behind the stand, and fills up a mason jar with the amber liquid. 

Luna buys one bushel of each fruit, and Raven helps her carry it back to the truck, so they can sit dangling their legs over the bed as they eat, sticky juice dripping down their chins and fingers. Eating stone fruit is always a messy business.

Luna asks the old man “If you don’t mind, what is there to do around here?”

He scratches the feathery hair on his chin. “Well, we aren’t far from the Great Salt Lake, I suppose,” he tells them, and then draws a map for them to follow, on a Subway napkin Raven finds in the glove box of the truck.

It’s a bit of a hike, and Raven’s leg is throbbing by the time they see the lake itself. Before the accident, she used to run six miles every morning. She took kickboxing lessons, and whitewater rafting, and mountain climbing, and went bungee jumping with Gina on their anniversary. And now she can barely hike a mile, before she wants to lay down and never get up. 

The lake itself is big. Well, that’s to be expected, but Raven didn’t know just  _ how _ big it really was.

“It’s the largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere,” Luna says. She’s grabbed a pamphlet from the information desk set up nearby. They charge admission, but it’s cheap, and it includes boat tickets to the islands. 

“It has  _ islands _ ?” Raven asks, but now that she actually looks, she can see that yes, the lake does in fact have islands.

“There are bison there,” Luna reads. “And antelopes. That’s nice.”

“Are we going over there?” Raven asks, frowning a little. It just seems like a lot more hiking.

“Why don’t we just swim around here and then see how we feel later,” Luna suggests, and Raven knows she’s probably just being nice, is probably taking Raven’s leg into consideration, but it just doesn’t feel like that. She’s so cavalier about everything to do with Raven’s fucked up existence; it’s refreshing.

The banks of the lake are lighter than any beach Raven’s ever seen, nearly white, which she supposes makes sense, if it’s a lake of salt. Even the water is filled with it; they strip down to their shirts and underwear, and wade in. Raven feels more nervous leaving her brace behind, than her phone--what if something happens to it? How will she get back to the truck?

She used to swim a lot, before the accident. At the local Y, or sometimes she and Gina would go down to the coast in Virginia, if they had a long weekend to spare. 

The first few weeks after, when she was still in the hospital, everyone suggested water therapy, but she never took them up on it. Now, the saline feels strange on her skin, and when she glances over she sees Luna laying flat on her bag, as though the water was a mattress. Raven presses her hand to the surface, and it nearly feels like her bed at the motel, pressing back. 

Raven squats down until the water’s at her shoulders, and tips her head back, soaking her hair. The salt feels strange, but not uncomfortable, and she thinks about stretching out like Luna, trusting the water to hold her up.

If Gina were here, she’d be splashing waves at her and laughing, daring her to dunk her head, to see who could hold their breath longer. Gina always won; when she was younger, apparently her family used to call her a hippo.

But Gina isn’t here, and instead it’s Luna’s fingers that find the skin of Raven’s shoulders, firm but cautious, like she’s waiting for Raven to tell her to stop.

She doesn’t.

“Lean back,” she says, and Raven follows her lead, closing her eyes so she doesn’t have to squint at the sun. Luna combs her fingers through Raven’s hair, and loosens it from the ponytail, letting it fan out in a cloud. Luna’s hands travel down Raven’s body, over her soaked-through shirt, to the band of skin on her belly, down the back of her thighs, guiding her legs up above the water, taking extra care with her injured knee. Raven holds her breath, waiting for her to let go, so that she’s at the mercy of the water, but she doesn’t.

“I’ve got you,” Luna says, and Raven snorts, keeping her eyes closed.

“I’m not some kid on training wheels,” she grumbles, but Luna still doesn’t let go.

“I always liked the view from the water,” Luna says. “It makes everything feel bigger, and stiller. Like a dream.”

“Until the sharks come,” Raven points out. 

“Sharks are actually very gentle, misunderstood creatures.” 

“Tell that to that one surfer that lost both arms. The one from that documentary.” 

They spend the afternoon floating in the shallows, letting the salt cling to their skin and hair and cake their eyelashes. When the sun starts to hang low over the banks, they head back to the truck.

“The ocean is better,” Luna says, as they rinse the sand and salt off with the hoses by the lake’s entrance. 

“Which one?” Raven asks, and she shrugs.

“Any of them. Oceans are always better.”

Raven doesn’t actually remember that the truck is still broken until she sees it sitting by the abandoned fruit stand. There’s just enough light for her to see by, and hastily patch it up, so Luna can cruise towards the nearest exit that advertises lodging.

They stay at a Motel 6 this time, so at least it’s a chain. 

“I’m so sorry,” the woman behind the desk tells them, when they try to check in, “But the only room we have available is a single queen bed.” She looks incredibly apologetic, but Raven just shrugs a shoulder. She grew up in foster care; she knows a few things about bed-sharing.

“That’s fine, it’s just one night anyway. I’m sure we’ll live.” She means it as a joke, but when she looks at Luna, she’s staring coolly back at the receptionist, who’s become visibly uncomfortable, fidgeting on her feet behind the counter.

“Oh, um, that’s--we could order you a  _ cot _ ,” she offers.

“Don’t bother,” Luna says, and hands over the cash. “Like she said; we’ll live.”

The woman makes a face, like she’s just smelled something awful, but gives them both a little envelope with the plastic key cards inside. “Enjoy your stay,” she says, and Raven doesn’t think she means it one bit.

She doesn’t put the pieces together until they reach their room.

“Oh my god,” she realizes, “She thinks we’re  _ together _ \--I guess this is the bible belt.”

“I can call and ask for that cot, if you would prefer,” Luna offers, but Raven shakes her head, reaching to unbuckle her brace with a groan.

“Not a chance. Think we can really mess up the bed in the morning? I wanna make it look like we had a huge lesbian orgy in here.”

Luna smirks, just a little. “I think we can manage that, yes.”

“You know, we wouldn’t have to worry about this stuff if you had a mattress in the bed of that truck,” Raven muses, flopping back on the bed. It’s just a shade more comfortable than the last one, the kind of luxury that comes from discount motel chains. 

She saw photographs of that, once. Old vans and buses and trucks with mattresses and comforters in the back, for cross-country road trips. Gina showed them to her, and said  _ we should do this, before we get old _ . They were going to do a lot of things before they got old, and Raven knows she isn’t  _ technically _ old yet, not by a long shot, but it’s hard to think about all the adventures that other twenty-something’s are having, or going to have, and knowing that she never will.

Her first cross-country road trip, and it’s just to get away from a bad break up, because she’s a coward who doesn’t have her own car.

This story doesn’t lend itself to some Pulitzer prize-winning memoir.

“What if it rains?” Luna wonders, still thinking about the mattress idea. Raven stands and hobbles over to the bathroom. She still smells overwhelmingly like salt, and hopes the cheap motel soap will be enough to cover it up.

“We’re in the American desert,” she points out, and shuts the door.

Her hair and shirt and underwear are all stiff from the saline, and she makes a face as she tosses her clothes in the corner, and contemplates just leaving them there for the motel to deal with. What if she just did that, left pieces of herself behind as they went, until she wound up on Bellamy and Clarke’s doorstep, with nothing but her?

“Don’t be a fucking dumbass,” she says, and gets in the shower.

When she walks out, Luna’s wearing that robe again, and she’s on the phone with the front desk. 

“Yes, I just had a question,” she says, as Raven towels her hair dry. “When was the last time it rained?”

Raven muffles her laugh with the towel, and then drops it in a wet heap on the floor, and climbs onto her side of the bed, near the window. 

“That long ago?” Luna asks, then she hums a little. “No, that was all. Thank you.” She hangs up, and turns to Raven. “Do you think you’ll be able to fix the truck tomorrow?”

“I can fix anything,” Raven tells her.  _ Liar _ , her brain says, and she ignores it. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about the truck. Worry about getting us to California.”

Luna’s quiet for a moment. “You think my head is pretty,” she says, and Raven frowns at her.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is,” Luna smiles, soft enough to make Raven swallow back her argument. “Don’t worry, I think your head’s pretty too.”

“That’s not what I was worried about,” she says, dry, and rolls over to turn her lamp off. Luna is a cool presence at her back, just inches away, and she can feel the mattress dip with each movement she makes. She tries to ignore it, along with the smell of her lotion, and her shampoo, and everything else about her.

She wakes up sweat-soaked and screaming soon enough, and feels Luna roll over, sliding her hands around Raven’s middle, holding her close.

“Shh,” she whispers, close enough that Raven feels her breath on the back of her neck. “You’re safe. It’s alright. Go back to sleep.”

Gina used to hold Raven too, when she woke up screaming and crying. But then Raven started thrashing in the nightmare because Gina’s arms felt constricting, like the seatbelt, and Gina had to sleep on the couch most nights, so she wouldn’t be tired or bruised at work. Love isn’t the best cure for mental illness.

Raven waits for the panic at constriction to bubble up inside her, but instead she feels oddly calm, and her heart begins to slow and steady in her chest. Luna continues to shush and murmur in her ear, arms cool against the skin of Raven’s stomach.

“I’ve got you,” Luna whispers, and Raven believes her.

 

Raven wakes up in the morning with her nose buried in Luna’s curls, practically suffocating. She still smells like the salt of the lake, but sweeter too, like wild heather, and sunlight. In her sleep, her arms had snaked under Luna’s robe, rucking up the material so her skin was against her skin. It was cool and smooth, and the feel of it made Raven shiver.

Luna hummed a little in her sleep, at the movement, and Raven froze. Should she let go and roll away? Act like they hadn’t spent most of the night spooning with her hands in Luna’s shirt? 

In the end, Luna makes the decision for her, turning over before Raven can take her arm back and feign sleep. 

“Morning,” she whispers, voice still waking up. She doesn’t have the voice of a smoker. Raven clears her throat and pulls away, laying on her back so she doesn’t have to look at her. 

If Luna can hear how fast Raven’s heart is beating in her chest, she ignores it. “Should we see if they serve any breakfast?”

Raven hadn’t really noticed, but at the mention of food, she realized she was  _ starving _ . Her stomach gave a gurgle in response, and Luna laughed.

“I’m taking that as a yes,” she said, and slipped into the bathroom with a change of clothes.

Raven has to close her eyes, a reflex. Even if it does nothing, the movement somehow makes everything feel stiller, calmer, like she has time to actually  _ think _ . 

Except all she can think about is how Luna’s skin felt underneath her hands, and Raven doesn’t want to think about that.

How long will it take Luna to get dressed? To slip into one of those long, colorful skirts of hers? Not long; she’s one of those women who manages to simultaneously look like she put no effort into her appearance, while also looking ready for some high resolution photo shoot in a field of wildflowers. Raven will barely have her hand down her shorts by the time Luna steps back out into the room.

She isn’t sure why she’s feeling this hard up; she and Gina hadn’t been having regular sex for months, not since the accident. Raven was still getting used to her leg, and how she could and couldn’t move it, which positions were now impossible, whether or not she could still be on top. It was a lot, and she was still self conscious of the surgical scars, and she was tired  _ all the time _ . 

She felt like a teenager in her first relationship, like she just couldn’t get enough.

And she didn’t even really  _ know _ her. Raven was never very into the idea of casual sex; she tried break-up sex once, with Bellamy after everything with Finn, and it was awful. Then she tried friends with benefits with her coworker, Wick, but he wanted more than she was willing to give, and that sex wasn’t great either. 

Now here she was, the protagonist in some shitty romantic comedy, getting worked up over some girl she’d met just two days ago. This was getting out of hand.

She’s dressed by the time Luna is finished, and they walk to the lobby together.

The motel does not serve free breakfast. They don’t offer any meals at all, and so Luna decides to walk down to the burger joint the street while Raven gets started on the truck.

It doesn’t take her long to figure out the problem, now that she has space to spread out and daylight to see by. She patches everything that needs patching, tightens some bolts that seemed a little too loose for comfort, and straightens up just as Luna shows up with a brown paper bag and two to-go cups of coffee that smells decidedly burnt. 

_ Better than nothing _ , she thinks, taking a gulp. It’s black, but she doesn’t mind. Luna stirs a pink packet of sweetener into hers, before drinking. They eat their breakfast in the cab, and then Raven goes inside to check them out, while Luna packs the truck up.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay,” the receptionist says a little curtly. 

Raven gives her sweetest smile. “Oh, we  _ definitely _ enjoyed it. A  _ lot _ .” She gives an over-the-top wink, and walks out. Luna’s waiting behind the wheel.

“They’re going to burn the room we stayed in,” Raven tells her, and then she flips off the whole motel as they drive away, for good measure.

She doesn’t notice the mattress until they stop for gas a little while later.

“Did you seriously steal a mattress from that motel?” she gapes, even though the answer’s obvious. 

“They were going to burn it anyway,” Luna shrugs, hanging the gas pump back up. She only ever pays with a shiny black credit card at the pump, when it comes to filling up the tank. “Think of it as recycling.”

Raven barks out a laugh and runs her hands over the floral padding. “You could have at least kept the sheet on it.”

Luna wrinkles her nose. “I thought that might be too much.”

“What, it’s okay to steal a three hundred dollar mattress, but not a ten dollar sheet?”

“ _ Recycle _ . It’s okay to  _ recycle _ a three hundred dollar mattress. Here’s ten bucks, can you go get me a snowball?”

That’s how the day moves; along highways and back roads when the highways were too clogged with mid-afternoon traffic and fifteen-car pileups, and billboards offering car insurance and bible studies and birth control and breast exams. Farms littered with cows and hay bales and irrigation systems like enormous metal creatures stretching over the land. The radio station is nothing but static and when Raven spins the dial around, searching, she manages to find the only  _ other _ station the truck can play; more country. She gives up with a huff and Luna cackles.

It’s getting harder and harder for Raven to stop  _ looking _ at her. Nothing else, just--looking. Watching. Seeing the way the sun dances in her hair, the way the wind blows through her curls and feathers, the way her sunglasses glint in the light, the way her mouth curls up when Raven says something funny, the way her many necklaces lay across her collar bones. Luna is a study in angles and curves, like a painting come to life, made of pigment and brushstrokes. She’s pretty, but she’s more than pretty, too. Raven doesn’t know how to describe it, even in her own thoughts. She’s never been very into art; that was always Clarke, and even Bellamy. Raven gets bored in museums, and she doesn’t really see the point in staring at the same old picture for more than two minutes. But now here’s this girl right in front of her, and she can’t seem to look away.

“You’re staring,” Luna says, pulling Raven from her own mind, but when she looks a little closer, she sees that Luna’s blushing.

_ I want to kiss you _ , Raven thinks, and she aches with the want, folding her hands under her thighs so they might stop twitching. 

“Your face looked funny,” she snaps, and turns her eyes back to the road, stretched out before them. It looks like it might stretch across the whole world. The southwest has nearly convinced Raven that everyone got it wrong, and the earth really is flat. That maybe if they just keep driving, they’ll end up in Australia somewhere. Like if they just keep driving, they might never have to stop.

“Oh, I love this song,” Luna says, turning the radio up so Raven can hear a Nashville twang droning on about small towns and Bud Lite and kissing girls on his tractor. She wrinkles her nose, even as Luna starts to hum along.

“You do not.”

But then Luna opens her mouth and starts singing  _ along _ ; she actually knows all the words, and Raven gets the worst serenade of her life.

“That’s three minutes I will never get back,” she says, once it’s over, but Luna ignores her.

It’s late when she starts to notice Luna’s eyelids drooping, and she has to mention it twice before Luna finally agrees to pull over.

“We’re nowhere near an exit,” she points out.

“Well it’s a good thing you stole us a bed, then,” Raven says, and that settles it.

It’s warm enough that they don’t need a blanket, and it feels strange to lay down without a pillow, but not unbearable. They stretch out side by side, pointedly not touching, and look up at the sky. They’re far enough from any lights that the stars are out in all their glory, and Raven can’t remember the last time she saw them like this. Before DC, definitely. Maybe not since she was a kid, staring out through her window, wishing she was anywhere other than Earth.

“I used to think the stars were angels,” Luna says suddenly. She’s sitting up a little, leaning a hand over the side of the truck, smoking. Raven can smell it on her breath. “And that falling stars were just guardian angels coming down to help whenever their person was in trouble. I used to stay up every night, and watch for mine.”

“My mom used to say stars were wishes,” Raven offers. “Like, they were the coins, and space was the well.” It’s strange, thinking about the woman her mother used to be, before she became the drunk that she usually remembers.

“I like that,” Luna decides, finishing up her fancy cigarette, and settling back down beside Raven. “I used to imagine space was like the ocean.”

“I guess it sort of is,” Raven muses. “What’s your deal with the ocean, anyway?” It feels like she should hold her breath as she waits for the answer. Neither of them has asked any personal questions yet, and it feels like she’s just crossed the threshold into something new.

“I grew up on the beach,” Luna says simply. “The ocean feels like home. There’s nothing else quite like it. When I was a little girl, I was convinced that I was a mermaid, and I’d just been enchanted to have legs. I thought that if I stayed in the water for long enough, my tail would come back, and I could stay there.”

Raven smiles, picturing a tiny version of Luna paddling around in the water, willing her legs to change. “So what happened?”

“Eventually my father fished me out.”

Raven squints to make out ursa major. “What happened to him?” 

For a moment, she thinks Luna won’t answer.

“He died,” she says, quiet. “What about your mother?”

“She killed herself,” Raven says, and the words taste bitter. “Not--she was an alcoholic. But it always felt like she was drinking to die, you know? It took a while, but that was the weapon she chose.”

Luna moves closer, and the air between them turns electric. Raven knows what comes next; she’ll ask why Raven wakes up screaming, and Raven will have to tell her about the accident, about how she nearly died because they didn’t salt the roads that night and she has a lead foot, and now she’s all fucked up over it. All fucked up over nothing. 

But instead, Luna leans up on one elbow looking down on her, and asks “Why are you going to California?”

Raven frowns. “I told you. I’m going to stay with--”

“The girl your ex cheated on you with and her husband,” Luna interrupts. “I know. But why are you going, really?”

She opens and closes her mouth; she doesn’t know which words to say. Because she broke up with her girlfriend and had an existential crisis? Because she’s a coward that runs from her problems? Because she used to be the person who could handle everything and now she can’t even handle herself? 

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” Raven says, and Luna kisses her.

When Raven was a girl, she and Finn would go down to the park two blocks down. It didn’t have much to offer; a metal slide that burned their skin in the summer, and an old rickety swing set that the other kids were too nervous to play on because the chains were so old. But Raven was never scared, and she used to dare Finn to see how high they could get. Finn always lost; the set would start to sway and he’d jump into the sand pit, but not Raven. She would swing and swing, going higher and higher, until finally when she jumped she felt like she might touch the sun.

This kiss feels like that jump and she holds her breath, waiting for the landing.

Luna pulls back, just a little, and when Raven opens her eyes, she finds her watching her, waiting to see how she reacts. Raven reaches up to fold her hands in Luna’s hair, and kisses her. She tastes like blackberries rather than smoke, and a little like cherry coke. There’s a tattoo on her shoulder, some intricate tribal-like design that Raven’s been studying all week, and she leans down to bite the skin there. Luna’s hand is cool on Raven’s skin, slipping up under her tank top to stroke her side.

Her other hand creeps down, soft and grazing over her bad leg, where the brace usually sits. She’s so gentle it  _ hurts _ , and Raven groans, moving closer, and closer, as close as she can get. After three days of trying to keep herself from reaching out, now she can’t seem to get close enough.

Luna pulls back, but only so she can slip the shirt off over her head, and then laughs a little breathlessly, when Raven immediately leans right in to mouth at the exposed skin. “There’s no rush.”

“There is,” Raven argues, slipping her hand between Luna’s thighs, and they both stop talking.

That night she falls asleep tangled up in Luna’s legs and hair, the smell of sex and salt on her skin. She doesn’t dream.

Raven wakes to water on her cheeks, sprinkling faintly across her bare back and shoulders, and she groans, nestling into Luna’s side even further, like shelter in a storm.

It takes her a minute to realize it’s actually raining.

“In the middle of the desert, in the summer, during a  _ drought _ ,” she grumbles, rushing to tug her clothes back on before they get soaked. “What are the odds, fucking seriously?”

Luna thinks it’s funny.

They wait for the storm to pass, getting off quick and dirty in the cab of the truck, with Luna on top so Raven can stretch out her leg as she rides her. 

The windows are covered with a sheen of sweat and Raven swipes her name across the glass, watching the letters melt into each other. She draws a moon underneath them, but that drips away too, and then the rain has stopped and everything smells new.

They dump the soggy mattress on the side of the road, and Raven kicks her foot up on the dashboard. She doesn’t even complain too much when Luna turns on the radio.

“Is this how you imagined your first road trip?” Luna asks. The sun is starting to set, and they’ve pulled over to eat in the bed of the truck after ordering food from a drive-thru. Luna’s smoking again, and the furls of it flow from her mouth, curling through the air silhouetted by the sun. Every movement she makes looks like a photograph.

“Who says this is my first road trip?” Raven asks, licking a spill of ketchup from her thumb. Luna gives her a knowing look. “ _ Fine _ , yeah, this is my first. I don’t know--I never really thought about it. I went on a backpacking trip once, but that was different. I’ve never seen the point in wasting so much gas, when you could just buy a plane ticket.”

“Why didn’t you just buy a plane ticket?”

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Raven doesn’t know. She certainly could have afforded a plane ticket, and it would have taken a lot less time, less headache. She’d be in Sacramento by now. But she didn’t, and she still isn’t sure why she found herself taking a cab to the bus station, rather than the airport that night. She isn’t sure she’ll ever know.

If her mother was still alive, she’d blame Jesus. Most things came back to Jesus, with her mother.

But she isn’t still alive, and Raven was never religious, so she shrugs.

“I just didn’t.”

Luna nods, like that was the answer she expected, and took a long drag from her cigarillo, puffing little blackberry-scented  _ o _ ’s out into the air, hollowing her cheeks with each exhale. 

Raven finishes the last of her fries, wipes the salt and grease off on the thigh of her jeans, and stretches a hand out. “Can I try one of those?”

Luna smirks a little, but hands the pack over. It’s long and flat and skinny, nothing like the packs Raven sees for sale at gas stations and supermarkets, and the outside is black with shiny French lettering. Raven pulls one of the slim cigarillos out and puts it between her lips, leaning over so Luna can light the end for her.

“What about you?” Raven asks, taking a drag of smoke, and immediately hacking it all back out again. Luna tips her head back and laughs, curls sticking to the sticky maroon of her lipstick. “My lungs weren’t made for cancer,” Raven tells her, but she takes another puff anyway, intent on smoking the whole thing without coughing to death. One fancy French blackberry-flavored cigarillo won’t kill her. 

Luna grins when she snorts it out through her nose, like a dragon. “You’re a natural,” she says, and Raven makes a face.

“Why are  _ you _ on this road trip?” she asks, and Luna turns to face the mountains. They’re somewhere in Nevada, and everything looks like it’s been brushed over with a thin film of mustard-yellow paint.

“I love this sky,” she says, staring up at it. “I was on the east coast for a while, up north. There was a beach there, but it wasn’t the same. And the sky wasn’t the same. The moon was off a bit.”

“Off a bit?” Raven frowns, but Luna ignores her, closing her eyes to the world. She finishes her cigarillo without coughing, and puts it out on the metal of the truck bed. Her mouth still tastes like smoke, and blackberries, but Luna kisses her anyway, sliding her hand around the nape of Raven’s neck to hold her in place.

Her lips are chapped when they pull apart, and Luna keeps her hand on her skin, smooth and cool like water.

“I think you might be the only person who likes smalltalk less than I do,” Raven says.

“I don’t see the point in it,” Luna agrees. “Nothing worth saying is small.”

They drive until the sun sinks down like an anchor, and then they check into a Red Roof Inn. The teenager manning the front desk looks tired, and the chipped nail polish on his fingernails match his dyed black hair. He doesn’t give any reaction when they ask for a room with one bed, just hands over the key cards and waves them off, eager to get back to the buzzing app on his phone.

“Do you want the first shower?” Raven asks, fishing through her bag for fresh underwear. Luna eyes her from across the room.

“We could take turns,” she hums. “Or I could run a bath for us to share.” 

Raven’s breath hitches in her chest. “Okay,” she breathes, and watches as Luna takes off her clothes one by one, fingers slow and methodical, leaving a trail of thin cotton as she makes her way to the bathroom.

She hears the water turn on, and sits down on the bed to start unbuckling her brace. 

Luna’s hands stop hers, pulling them away. “Let me,” she says, and slowly pulls it off, setting it aside on the mattress. Then she reaches for the button on Raven’s jeans, helping her stand so she can pull those off too. Then her shirt, and sports bra. She pulls her hair out of its ponytail and runs her fingers through it until it falls over Raven’s shoulders.

She follows Luna into the bath.

She must have found some sort of bath balm, turning the water sudsy and lavender, warm on Raven’s skin as she settles in with her back against the far end. Luna folds herself down between her legs, facing her, eyes brighter than usual. 

Luna reaches for the soap on the shelf and lathers her hands up before reaching in, sliding them down Raven’s neck, her shoulders and dipping in between her breasts. She traces the lines of her body, the dip in her clavicle, along her ribs and the grid of her abdomen, stroking along her thighs and creeping over her bad knee so gently Raven almost doesn’t feel it.

She rinses the trail of soap first with water, and then follows with her mouth.

“You’re pretty good at this,” Raven says, gasps, as Luna sucks a bruise onto the flesh of her thigh. Now that they aren’t lying down in the truck bed in the middle of the night, she can see Luna clearly. She’s covered in tattoos like ancient runes, or strange twisted vines, each more detailed than the last, and Raven wants to run her tongue over all of them.

“I practice,” Luna says, gripping her by the hips. She takes care to make sure Raven’s bad leg is supported, and then raises her cunt to her mouth.

Raven’s eyes slam shut and she whines, counting her breaths so she doesn’t come too quickly. She wants this to last, building up and up until she thinks she might burst from it. She has to focus on other things; the heat of the water contrasted against the cool of Luna’s tongue against her. The feel of Luna’s curls as she tangles her fingers up in them, searching for something to grip, something to anchor herself with. 

“Fuck,” she swears, and then swears some more in Spanish, as Luna’s mouth takes her over the edge.

Luna pulls back as Raven’s breathing steadies. She runs a hand along the tattoo on Luna’s shoulder, over the bruise that she left there the night before. “Sorry,” she offers, still shaky from her orgasm.

Luna shakes her head, curls wet and sticking to the skin of her jaw and neck. “Don’t be.” She lets Raven pull her in, kissing her messily, licking the taste of herself from her tongue. She slides two fingers inside her, swallowing her gasp.

“You’re pretty good at this,” Luna tells her, and Raven grins, biting her lip.

She gets Luna off twice with her hand, and then washes her hair with the complementary two-in-one shampoo bottles. The water’s gone cold by the time they’re finished, and they don’t bother getting dressed before falling into bed together.

“My father used to tell my brother and I this folktale about a raven who fell in love with the moon,” Luna whispers, tracing a finger down the divots of Raven’s spine, making her shiver.

“A bird fell in love with the  _ moon _ ?” Raven asks, eyes closed against her pillow. She feels Luna’s grin against the bare skin of her shoulder. 

“The moon was a goddess,” she says. “And the bird was a witch. They could only be together every new moon, when they were both in their human forms.”

“Your dad told you lesbian folktales? Lucky. My mom only ever talked about Jesus.”

“The raven was a man,” Luna smiles.

“Yeah, that sounds about right. So what happened to them? Did they live happily ever after?”

“Sort of,” Luna says. “The sun god was also in love with the moon, and he was jealous of the raven, so he conspired with a hunter, to have him killed. He was pierced through the heart with an arrow, but the moon was so broken hearted that she went to her father, the sky god, and begged him to save her love. The sky god was moved by her grief, and placed the raven in the stars, so they could finally be together.”

“Mythology is weird,” Raven says. “My friend has a classics degree, and he always tells the weirdest stories when he gets drunk. Did you know Zeus gave birth to Athena from his forehead? Gods are always doing fucked up shit like that.”

“I kind of like it,” Luna admits. “They’re flawed, like us.”

Raven scoffs. “ _ I’m _ not about to pull a baby out of my forehead any time soon.”

“That’s why there’s birth control,” Luna says, serious, and Raven laughs. 

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, but soon enough she’s screaming herself awake, voice hoarse and skin slick with wet as she shakes in Luna’s arms. 

Luna smooths the hair back from her face, humming softly until Raven can breathe again.

“I was in an accident,” she says, once she can speak again. Her throat still hurts, but she ignores it. For the first time since it happened, she just wants to  _ tell _ someone. “Totaled my car. I fell asleep at the wheel and hit a patch of ice. Ended up going over the bridge, and into the water. I thought for sure I was gonna die.”

She’s still shaking--can’t make herself stop--and she lets Luna pull her in close, cooling down the fire burning under her skin. She can still feel the dread, the sinking feeling of  _ this is it. This is the end _ .

“But you didn’t,” Luna says. “You lived. You made it.”

Raven grins bitterly as her knee starts to throb, almost on cue. “Most of me, anyway.”

“All the pieces that count,” Luna argues. “All the best parts.”

“You didn’t even know me before,” Raven points out. “I was--different. Better.”

“Better is a matter of opinion,” Luna says, brushing the hair out of her eyes so she can see them. “I can’t imagine a better Raven than the one that’s right here, right now.”

Suddenly, Raven doesn’t want to talk anymore.

She leans in, kissing Luna so hard that they nearly roll over. “You’re sweet,” she says, licking the taste of her from her lips. Moonlight filters in through the curtains, turning Luna’s skin to burnished silver.

“You’re beautiful.”

The next morning, the truck doesn’t start.

“Did you leave the lights on?” Raven asks, even though she knows she didn’t. She frowns down at the engine, like that might somehow help the situation.

Luna sweet-talks another customer into giving them a jump, but the engine still won’t turn over, and Luna’s forced to go back inside and extend their stay at the inn. Raven tinkers with it until the early afternoon, when she lets Luna talk her upstairs with promises of sex and room service.

In the end the sex is mind-blowing but the room service menu leaves a lot to be desired.

“Do you think Papa John’s might deliver here?” Raven wonders. Luna shrugs but requests Hawaiian, and Raven googles the nearest shop.

Apparently they do, and they eat the whole pie with their legs folded up on the mattress, flipping through different sitcoms on the flat screen TV.

Raven wakes to find Luna half-dressed in one of her jersey's, working on a crossword at the little window-side table. 

“I ordered breakfast,” she says, not bothering to look up, and Raven walks over to find a plate of five-minute blueberry waffles waiting for her, while Luna slowly works through a bowl of fresh-ish sliced fruits.

“When do we check out?” Raven asks around a mouthful of waffle.

Luna scrawls in a six-letter word for  _ burning _ . “Whenever you get the truck running.”

But Raven doesn’t get the truck running.

She tries all the usual quick fixes, patching up anything that looks even remotely crooked or suspicious, but the engine still won’t turn, and not even the emergency lights will turn on. For all intents and purposes, it seems like the truck is dead for good.

“We’ll just try again tomorrow,” Luna shrugs when the sun goes down. She says it the next night too, and the night after, and then eventually she stops saying anything, and Raven stops bothering to pop the hood of the truck.

And that’s just how they exist, for a while. Raven loses track of the days, and Luna doesn’t seem to care much either. They sleep until they wake up, kissing lazily in the sheets until one or both of them get hungry. Then they order room service, or sometimes walk down to the nearby diner, if they’re feeling antsy, or need the sunlight. Luna does the morning crossword at the table, and Raven offers suggestions that she knows don’t make sense. They eat ice cream sandwiches in bed and watch late night talk shows and fuck in the shower.

Sometimes Raven wakes up screaming, and sometimes she doesn’t. Luna always holds her.

“What is this?” Luna asks. 

Raven’s in the bathroom brushing her teeth, and she glances over to see Luna picking up the metal bird necklace, from where she set it down on the bedside table for safekeeping, when she was going through her bag.

Raven feels herself staring, feels herself locking up, words that she’s never been able to say getting lodged in her throat, strangling her from the inside out. Luna must notice, because then she’s putting the necklace back where she found it, and walking over.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry,” she offers, and Raven shakes her head, leaning over the sink to rinse her mouth, before answering.

“It’s not that, it’s--it was a gift. My ex made it for me. Finn.”

Luna watches her for a moment, checking to make sure she’s okay, and Raven can’t just let it end there, because it’s so much more than just  _ a gift from an ex boyfriend _ .

“He died,” she says, and Luna tugs her gently by the hand, until they’re sitting on the bed facing each other. “We grew up together,” she explains, starting from the beginning. “I thought I was gonna marry him, you know? We were dating before we even knew what dating was. He was my first everything, and I was his, but then we went to different universities and he cheated on me. With Clarke, the girl I’m going to stay with in California.” 

It’s a jarring reminder; she’s going to California, to stay with Clarke. Eventually, they are going to leave this hotel room, and drive the last fifty miles to the California state line, and she’s going to go to Bellamy and Clarke’s while Luna goes to wherever she’s going.

Eventually, this road trip will come to an end.

“I forgave him for it--I mean, we still broke up, but I couldn’t just cut him out of my life. He was the only family I had left, and he was still my best friend. But then at work--it’s so stupid. He was climbing a ladder at work, and he missed a step, and fell. And he died.”

It still feels too much like a middle school book report; like she’s left out the middle, and is just giving Cliff’s Notes on her relationship with Finn. It was so much more than a childhood romance and bad breakup and random death--but those are the main plot points, and so that’s what she tells people. Not the time he spelled out  _ I love you _ in rose petals on her bed for their anniversary, or the time he tried to take up the guitar and wrote a spectacularly awful love song for her, or the time she tried to give him a haircut and ended up slicing his ear open by accident. There are all these little details and moments that will always live inside her, but no one else will ever know about, because the only other person who shared them is dead. And that’s always been the saddest part.

Luna stays quiet for a moment, before reaching out to take Raven’s hands in hers, flipping them palm-up, like she’s studying her life lines.

“My fiance, Derrick, was my best friend too,” she offers, and it feels bigger than it is. “We were together for years before he asked me to marry him, because he was so nervous, and wanted it to be perfect. Three days later, he was at a Seven Eleven, buying popcorn. We were going to watch a movie that night. And someone decided to rob the store. It probably would have been over quickly, but Derrick was a firefighter. He didn’t believe in just, standing by. He tried to stop it, and the man shot him in the head.”

Raven thinks about all the moments Luna probably has stored up inside of her--all of the movie nights, and the dinner dates, and the stuttered, perfect proposal that no one else is around to remember. She thinks about all of the different parts of grief that neither of them will ever be able to really share with people, because no one else will ever really understand.

She winds her fingers through Luna’s, and raises her knuckles up to her mouth. It’s less like  _ I’m sorry _ and more like  _ I know _ , and when she finds Luna’s eyes they gleam in the light.

She puts the necklace away in her bag, before they curl up on the bed. She doesn’t need to see it anymore.

They’re up on the rooftop of the inn, watching the sky turn orange then purple then blue then black, watching the stars come out and the moon rise up and the smoke from Luna’s cigarillo fade through the air.

“This night feels like a secret,” Raven says. “That’s something my mom used to say. She’d say  _ this night feels like a secret _ , whenever she wanted me to be quiet.”

“It does feel like a secret,” Luna agrees. “Just between us.”

Raven moves so that her head is pillowed on Luna’s thigh, and Luna runs her fingers through her hair, nails scraping pleasantly down her scalp. “What’s something you’ve never told anyone else?”

Luna’s quiet for a moment, thinking. “I’m afraid of heights.”

“Really? Why?”

She puts out the cigarillo on the cement roof and leans back on both palms. “It’s just one of those unfounded fears. I’ve had it since I was a kid.”

“I was going to be the first woman on Mars,” Raven says.

“What stopped you?”

“Heart murmur. They found it during the training physical; months of passing every test they threw at me, and then I’m cockblocked by my own heart. They ended up using my own equations to get someone else up there.”

Luna leans down and breathes a flume of blackberry smoke into Raven’s mouth. Raven closes her eyes and takes it in. If she isn’t careful, she’ll get addicted.

“We should raid the minibar,” Luna decides, and tugs Raven to her feet. 

There are a few tiny bottles of vodka and tequila and some coconut-flavored rum, which is as gross as it sounds, and Raven mixes some together with what she remembers from her time dating a bartender, until they’re both thoroughly wasted.

Raven’s always been an angry, loud sort of drunk, the kind who’s just as likely to start a fight as she is to climb up on a table and dance. Luna’s more reserved, which makes sense, and mostly just spends her time between braiding Raven’s hair, and talking about the moon like it’s a person.

“She just-- _ cares _ so much,” she tells her, intently. “More than she wants anyone else to know. Because she’s so used to being alone, you know? She’s lonely. No one ever thinks to ask about her day.”

In the morning, Raven will probably realize that Luna’s referring more to herself than the actual giant hunk of space rock hanging out next to their planet. If she isn’t too hungover.

They’re too drunk to completely undress, but they readjust their clothes as well as they can, to make way for messy mouths and sloppy fingers, and Raven drinks Luna’s moans like a lullaby before passing out on the bed.

When she wakes up, she’s alone in the room and it feels like something died in her mouth. She has to squint to see through the daylight, enough to make out that it’s sometime in the afternoon, and her brain feels like it’s screaming.

Luna shows up a few minutes later with food and coffee, looking impossibly flawless and not hungover at all, because of course Luna doesn’t get hangovers. Why would she? She doesn’t seem to have any other human flaws, either.

“How are you feeling?” she asks, tossing a to-go bag that smells like salt and grease, by Raven’s head. 

“Like I should be euthanized,” Raven grumbles, and Luna laughs. Raven isn’t sure when that started to sound like music to her, but it does now, and there doesn’t seem to be any stopping it. 

She smells like Luna, like blackberries and smoke and salt and sunshine. She isn’t sure when that happened, either. When Luna started rubbing off on her like one of those perfume samplers that she gets sometimes in the mail.

“I got you extra ketchup,” Luna tells her, wrinkling her nose in distaste. Luna likes to eat her fries sans condiments, like a  _ heathen _ .

How long has it been, since they came here? A week? Two weeks? Raven thinks she would have noticed if it was any longer, but would she really? The past few days seem like a blur, like a video of someone else’s life, that she didn’t actually experience. Like a dream that someone told her about, the next morning.

Raven rips the brown paper bag open and spreads the fries out over it, setting it between them, reminiscent of their first meal together, at that fly-infested diner in the Midwest. 

“My only friends are the guy I had hate sex with once, the girl my ex boyfriend cheated on me with, and some girl who picked me up off the side of the road,” she says, and pops a fry in her mouth, raising a brow like a dare.  _ Your turn _ .

Luna eyes her for a moment before leaning forward, taking the bait. “My only friends are my ex-neighbor, and some hitchhiker.” She takes two fries.

“I lost my only dream,” Raven shoots.

“I’ve never had a dream,” Luna shoots back.

“I have night terrors about dying in a car accident.”

“I can’t go into a gas station without having a panic attack.”

“I’ve never been in love and I’m worried I never will be,” Raven says, and it sounds strange, because she’s only recently started to think it. She’d always thought that, at least with Finn, she’d known what it was to fall in love with someone. But now, looking back on their puppy dog relationship, she’s not so sure.

Luna goes quiet at that, before taking another, smaller fry. “I’m scared I lost my one chance at real happiness.”

“I’m terrified of commitment,” Raven admits.

“I can’t seem to stay in one place,” Luna says.

“That’s basically the same thing,” Raven tells her, and she doesn’t know why that thought fills her with panic. Luna just smiles.

“I guess you win, then.”

They finish eating while Family Feud plays in the background, and then Raven slips into the bathroom to change.

She stands at the counter in her underwear, and stares back at her reflection. It’s been awhile since it’s come to this.

“You’re a fucking coward,” she says, and it doesn’t even fight back.

Raven waits until Luna’s breathing is steady with sleep, before crawling out of bed and packing up all her clothes in the dark. She can’t see very well; it’s inevitable that she’ll forget something, and she’ll deal with that later. 

Outside, she pops the hood and works by the light of her phone. She’d realized what the issue was a few days ago, and simply hadn’t gotten around to actually fixing it. Now she does, and she leaves a note scrawled on the back of one of the many old receipts carpeting the floor of the truck. 

_ I’m sorry. Thanks for taking me this far. And for everything else. I hope you get to where you’re going, and I hope you find happiness. You deserve it. _ She signs it with a terrible drawing of a bird, because she fucking hates goodbyes, and then she leaves the note propped up on the dashboard so it’ll hopefully be the first thing Luna sees.

Then she hitches her bag up on her shoulder, holds her thumb out, and starts walking.

She’s in California by midday, and reaches Sacramento that evening.

When she’s half an hour away, she decides it’s probably a good idea to give Bellamy and Clarke a call and at least warn them she’s coming.

Raven’s been spending the last few days keeping her phone on silent, with the data off, steadily ignoring all the calls and texts and emails and every other notification that she’s gotten since she left DC. She switches the data on and is buried under them all at once. The little notifications bar at the top starts seizing from the pressure.

The missed calls and texts are pretty evenly divided between Gina, Bellamy and Clarke, with a few from Octavia, even though she and Raven typically only interact in person, since their relationship is only based off of having mutual friends.

The voicemails and texts range from irritated to worried to desperate and terrified, and Raven feels guiltier with each one.

She shoots Gina a quick text, just to let her know that she’s alive and on her way to Bellamy and Clarke’s, and then calls Clarke’s cellphone, because she’s less likely to lecture her than Bellamy. Bellamy can honestly be such a  _ mom _ sometimes, and Raven just isn’t in the mood.

“Hello?” Clarke asks, sounding unsure.

“What, did you think it was a wrong number?” Raven asks, wry, and hears Clarke let out a breath of relief.

“Oh, thank god,” she sighs, and then shouts to someone in the background,  _ it’s her! She’s alive! _

“Disappointed?” Raven asks, and Clarke scoffs.

“Surprised,” she corrects. “We’ve been thinking you were dead in a ditch somewhere for the last five days. Bellamy made MISSING posters.”

“He did not,” Raven says, even though she knows it might be true.

“He did. Where are you?”

“Thirty minutes from your house, actually,” she admits, and Clarke snorts.

“I don’t suppose that’s a coincidence, and you just  _ happen _ to be in the area,” she says dryly. “Were you planning to at least let us know?”

“I’m letting you know now,” Raven points out, and Clarke hums. Even her hum sounds sarcastic.

“You couldn’t have at least let us know you were okay? We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for two weeks, now. Bellamy thought you ran off to drink yourself to death in Las Vegas. O thought you were being sacrificed by a cult on some island. I tried to tell them you were probably just having an existential crisis about the weather.”

“Am I Nicholas Cage in all of these scenarios?” Raven asks.

“Of course,” Clarke says, like it’s obvious. “Who else would you be?”

“Good point. You were the closest, by the way,” she admits.

“Awesome. Bellamy owes me five bucks.”

“Aren’t you guys married? His five bucks is already your five bucks.”

Clarke says “Semantics. When will you be here?”

“Soon,” Raven says helpfully. “Thanks for letting me crash for a while.”

“Of course,” Clarke tells her. “I mean, you have to name your firstborn after us, but that’s all.”

“What, after both of you? Bellamy Clarke Reyes?”

“Or Clarke Bellamy,” she points out. “Our names work both ways. We’re flexible.” Then she hangs up, presumably to rush through cleaning her house without doing any  _ actual _ cleaning, instead just stashing all the clutter in drawers and cupboards for her to forget about until later.

Raven leans her head against the window of the Toyota she’d snagged a ride in, and thinks back to Luna. Was she still at the inn? Had she found Raven’s note? Had she left? Was she in California, yet? Did she get to where she was headed?

Was she thinking about Raven? Or was she trying not to think of her at all? Did she wake up to find the bed empty and Raven’s things missing, and feel as empty as Raven did when she climbed into someone else’s truck?

_ Don’t think about her _ , she tells herself. Then,  _ as if. _

Raven’s seen Bellamy and Clarke’s house from the pictures in their Christmas cards and on Facebook, but she’s never been there in person. Their neighborhood is nice, picturesque and suburban, fit to star in a teen drama on the CW. The house itself is a Craftsman, a pretty dark blue with white shutters and a wide front porch, a perfect childhood home, the kind meant for Thanksgiving dinners and dress-up parties and family photos. 

Clarke’s the one that answers the door, and Raven hasn’t even managed to say hello yet, before Clarke’s tugged her into a bone-crushing hug. It’s been nearly two years since Bellamy and Clarke moved, and Raven’s missed them, missed this. She breathes Clarke in; she smells like summer rain, and milk.

“Wow, I forgot how short you are,” Raven says, and Clarke lets go. For having just had a kid less than a year ago, she looks amazing. Her hair is shorter than it used to be, and she’s gained a little bit of weight, but she’s still the girl Raven remembers from her Virginia Tech days. She’s still  _ Clarke _ .

“Shut up,” she says, but she’s grinning too much for it to carry any real heat. She steps inside, holding the door open for Raven to follow. 

Inside the house is even more overwhelming with its familial atmosphere, the kind that Raven’s never really known what to do with. Everything is warm and inviting and  _ homey _ in a way she’s not used to, and it always makes her uncomfortable, because it’s exactly what she always wanted and exactly what she never had.

There’s a rack inside the door that’s overflowing with shoes--sandals and flip flops and work boots and running sneakers--and hooks made out of old doorknobs for collecting unused hats and scarves, just biding their time until autumn. 

Raven follows Clarke down the hall, taking in the framed photographs and art prints on the walls, until they reach the sprawling kitchen. Bellamy’s there, stirring something on the stove top, with a baby propped up on one hip. Clarke wanders up and smacks a sloppy kiss to her daughter’s cheek, making her squeal happily and tug at Clarke’s hair with her chubby baby hands. It’s all incredibly domestic.

“Reyes,” Bellamy grins, looking out at her over his glasses. He’s a mess, but looks pretty much how she remembers. Fatherhood’s a good look on him. “You’re looking very hobo-chic.”

“You’re looking very Mr. Mom,” Raven shoots back, and his whole face lights up. 

“You want to meet her?” he asks, and then turns to his daughter, cooing to get her attention. “Penelope, say hi to Aunt Raven. Say hi, Penelope.” He lets go of the wooden spoon to take hold of her chubby wrist, and wobble a hand at Raven, like a wave.

Raven’s seen the baby pictures too, of course, but they don’t really compare to the real thing, not when she’s gurgling and reaching out for her, slobbering all over her in person.

“Your kid is a drool factory,” Raven tells them, making a face at the slime.

“Yeah, you get used to that,” Clarke says wryly. “We live in a house of fluids.”

Octavia wanders in then, and hops up onto one of the wooden bar stools at the breakfast bar, typing something into her phone. She lives with them, in the separated garage out back, that’s been converted into a bedroom. “Hey, Raven,” she offers without looking up. “Long time no see.” 

“What’s up baby Blake,” Raven says, grinning when she makes a face at the old nickname. She sets down her phone and starts making funny faces at Penelope, who wiggles and claps in Raven’s arms. 

She’s still at that new baby age where she can’t really form words, but she can make noises, little one-syllable grunts to let them all know when she’s pleased or disgruntled. She doesn’t have much in the way of dexterity, but she likes to put her hands on things, and she can’t crawl all that well, but she scoots around on her bottom and is surprisingly fast about it.

“I’ve been speaking to her in Latin whenever Clarke’s not around,” Bellamy confesses. “I’m hoping her first word will be  _ pater _ .” 

“You’re such a nerd,” Raven says, but it’s all fondness. She’s missed her ridiculous, nerdy, married best friends. It’s easy for her to sometimes forget just how  _ much _ she misses someone, until she sees them again and remembers what she’s been missing.

They’re currently sitting on the living room floor, feeding Penelope different objects that she can put in her mouth without choking. Every so often she’ll suddenly forget how to hold herself up, and flop back on the carpet with wide eyes, like gravity just snuck up on her. 

“I’m not usually a baby person but I have to admit, your baby is cute.”

“Our baby is  _ awesome _ ,” Bellamy says, and hands her a plastic sunglasses case to slobber on. Once she gets bored with that, Octavia gives her an old TV remote. 

They eat the box spaghetti that Bellamy made on the stove, and then Clarke just whips her shirt off and starts to breastfeed Penelope at the table.

She must notice Raven’s surprise, because she laughs. “Sorry. After the first few months, I got over the self consciousness of it. When she’s got to eat, she’s got to eat.”

“You get used to it,” Octavia says, making a face. “I’ve seen Clarke’s boobs more than my girlfriend’s.”

“To be fair, you’ve only been seeing Niylah for like a month,” Bellamy points out, but Octavia just shrugs and shovels more noodles in her mouth, like a hoover. 

Apparently the deal is that Bellamy makes the dinner, and Octavia does the dishes. Raven starts bringing bowls over to the sink, to help. 

“What about you?” she asks Clarke, who’s finished breastfeeding and has now moved onto burping the baby.

“I made a life,” she says loftily, gesturing at Penelope as proof, and Bellamy smiles stupidly at the two of them while Octavia just rolls her eyes.

The domesticity of life with the Blake’s, and Penelope, has managed to distract Raven pretty well. But now Bellamy’s taking the baby upstairs to put her to sleep, and the house is growing quiet, and the night feels like a secret.

Raven thinks about the way the sunlight hit the tattoo on Luna’s shoulder, and how her mouth felt on her skin.

There’s a half-bathroom attached to the guest room upstairs, where Raven is staying, and she finds herself facing her reflection again.

“Don’t think about Luna, or Gina, or Finn,” she tells it. “And no screaming tonight. Just--get through tonight. Don’t fuck this up.”

Eventually, Raven will get to the point where she doesn’t need to lecture her own reflection on what is and is not appropriate behavior. But until then, this will have to do.

Clarke is waiting outside the door, to corner her, looking concerned.

“Gina called us and told us what happened,” she starts, following Raven into the room and curling up with her on the bed, tossing the dozen decorative pillows aside to make room. “Why didn’t you just take a plane?”

Raven flops back on the bed, suddenly more exhausted than she’s felt all week. She might not bother taking the brace off. She might not bother getting undressed. “I don’t know,” she admits. “One minute, I was packing my bags and the next I was on a Greyhound headed west. And then the bus stopped at a gas station, so I got out to go to the bathroom, and they left without me. I hitchhiked the rest of the way.”

“Holy shit, Raven,” Clarke frowns, her maternal mode having activated. “That’s so dangerous--you could have just called us! We would have come pick you up.”

“Hindsight is twenty-twenty,” Raven sighs. 

“So that’s all this was, then?” Clarke asks, gentle, like she’s still worried she might spook her. Like she’s feeling her out. “You were just hitchhiking? You weren’t  _ actually _ on a bender in Las Vegas?”

“I never went to Las Vegas,” Raven says dutifully. “But I did mean it, when I said there was some existential crises involved. I kind of freaked out a little.”

Clarke snorts, patting Raven’s good knee. “I think you passed  _ kind of freaked out a little _ the minute you bought a cross-country bus ticket because you broke up with your girlfriend.”

Raven laughs--because it’s either laugh, or have a mental break down over what her life is, right now. Laughing is the only real option. “Yeah,” she agrees, but Clarke’s gone soft, and quiet.

“I’m sorry about you and Gina,” she offers. 

Raven shrugs, and lets Clarke lean her head on her shoulder. “I think the worst part is that I’m not actually that sad about it, you know? Like, I feel bad because I hurt her, but that’s it. I think I sort of knew this is where things were headed for a while. Longer than I realized.”

Clarke hums, and Raven leans her head on hers. “It’s good to have you,” she says, and Raven knows she means it. “Even if the circumstances aren’t that great. We miss you. We miss Gina and everyone else too, but not like we miss you.”

“Parents aren’t supposed to have favorites,” Raven points out, and Clarke laughs.

“I think they’ll forgive us.”

Raven doesn’t actually go to sleep that night; she’s too worried she might have a nightmare, and wake up the baby, and subsequently the whole house. 

Instead, she fucks around on her phone for a while, tries to read and fails at focusing, starts tinkering with one of those street fair metal puzzles that she found in her bag, goes through one of Bellamy’s enormous atlases lined up downstairs, and then finds an old issue of National Geographic to flip through while she drinks her third cup of coffee.

She’s still sitting at the breakfast bar in the kitchen when Octavia comes wandering in around sunrise, wearing a tiny black dress made of fringe and some shimmery eye makeup. She gives Raven a haphazard wave before tottering out back to the garage. 

Raven finishes her coffee and decides to try taking a walk, since her veins feel like electric currents inside her skin.

It’s six in the morning, which means it’s only three AM in Virginia, but Raven knows that Gina’s job has made her practically nocturnal, so she decides to try calling anyway.

She answers on the second ring.

“Raven?”

Raven opens her mouth and closes it twice, before she can speak. “Yeah,” she clears her throat. “It’s me. Hey.”

“Hey,” Gina says, sounding uncertain. “It’s um, nice to finally hear from you.”

“Yeah I was off the grid for a while,” she says, scuffing her boots along the sidewalk. The air around her is cool enough that her arms are starting to goosebump, and everything is that early morning shade of blue. “Sorry.”

“How are you now?” 

Raven tips her head back to squint up at the sky. She can’t see the sun yet, it’s still too early, but the clouds are pale and pink with dawn. “Good,” she decides. “Better, at least. Getting better. You?”

“Good,” Gina agrees. “Better. That’s all you can ask for, I guess.”

“Yeah.” The conversation stumbles as they each wait for the other to speak. 

Finally, Gina sighs. “Take care of yourself, Raven.”

“You too,” Raven says. Her phone clicks; call ended. She stuffs it into her back pocket and continues down the block.

When Raven gets back to the house, Bellamy’s car is gone, probably to work. Some instrumental music, the kind played at raves held in abandoned subway tunnels, is blasting from the back of the house. Raven follows the sound she finds Clarke in what might have once been a study, working on an enormous painting, wearing nothing but a paint-stained t-shirt that falls down her thighs, with her messy hair thrown up in a tangled knot on her head.

Penelope is sitting in one of those plastic baby table-seats, the kind with wheels so she can move around, and little wooden beads attached for her to play with. She’s bopping along to the music with a gummy smile.

When Raven studies the painting a little more closely, she can see that it’s a nude portrait of Bellamy in bed. 

“Glad to know you two are keeping the magic alive,” she smirks, and Clarke glances over at her with a wolfish grin. 

“It’s not easy being a muse,” she agrees. “But someone’s got to do it.”

Raven hums, crouching down so she can cross her eyes at the baby. “Do you think we can swing by the post office today?” she asks. “I have to change my address, for the disability checks.”

“Of course,” Clarke says, finishing a stroke of freckles on painting-Bellamy’s chest. “Let me just get dressed and get the kid ready, and we can go.”

Clarke isn’t someone that Raven would normally describe as maternal. Responsible, yes, caring, absolutely, but not  _ maternal _ . If she’s being honest, Raven never thought Clarke would actually  _ want _ to ever have kids of her own. If anyone had asked her two years ago, she would have guess adoption, or just some cats.

But now she watches Clarke beam down at her daughter as she expertly changes her diaper, and she’s forced to reassess her opinion. 

She’s heard that babies change people, of course, but she’d always thought there were exceptions to that rule. She’s always thought Clarke was an exception to that rule, and she thought that she was too. But if Clarke’s turned into Super-Mom in just eight months, what if the same thing might happen to Raven?

It’s an unsettling thought, and so Raven shoves it to the back with the others. Her mind’s storage locker of intrusive thoughts is getting pretty full.

Clarke’s car is a family-friendly Corolla, and she plays the Veggie Tales soundtrack for Penelope while they drive.

“You listen to this every time you drive somewhere?” Raven asks with distaste. First Luna’s unbearable country station, now  _ this _ monstrosity? She’s aching for some classic rock.

“You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Do The Moo Shoo,” Clarke tells her seriously.

“I will throw up all over this car,” Raven threatens, and she even mostly means it.

When they get to the post office, they still have to spend ten minutes setting up Penelope’s stroller, because she’s asleep and Clarke doesn’t want to chance waking her up and causing a meltdown.

It’s strange, seeing her friends being parents. The last time Raven saw Bellamy and Clarke, they were barely adults, and definitely the least adult-like married couple that she knew. They used to throw drunk scrabble parties at their house every weekend, where everyone showed up with the worst-sounding alcoholic drink they could find, and a board game, and chaos ensued. Raven woke up on the overhang roof of their front porch once, with no memory of how she got there, and when she looked down she saw Clarke asleep face-down on the lawn. 

But then Bellamy got his dream job at a university across the country, and Clarke figured she could paint anywhere they wound up, and now suddenly they were just another set of new parents living in suburban northern California. 

They’re still out running errands when Bellamy gets off of work, so he meets them at a coffee shop, wearing an actual suit jacket with  _ elbow patches _ , and a tie.

He picks the baby up immediately, like he’s an addict that hasn’t had his fix, and Raven tries very hard to hold back the mockery, but despite a frankly commendable effort, it’s impossible.

“Elbow patches? Really?” she teases. “You must be giving so many kids some  _ weird _ sex kinks.”

Bellamy makes a face at her, and then winces when Penelope twists her chubby fists into his hair. “It’s called  _ being professional _ ,” he tells her.

“It’s called Benjamin Button syndrome,” Raven says. “You’re a seventy-two year old war veteran trapped in the body of a guy in his thirties.”

“I like his elbow patches,” Clarke says, looking not-quite-innocent, and Raven pretends to throw up.

They spend the rest of the afternoon showing her the sights, including some really old buildings that she doesn’t care about, some really old Cathedral that she doesn’t care about, and the really big bridge--which is apparently  _ not _ the Golden Gate Bridge, and people get annoyed when you ask about it. Bellamy also insists on pointing out every historical landmark that they pass, which happens frequently since Sacramento is an old city. Or at least, old by American standards. 

Raven’s favorite is definitely the state railroad museum, because she never really grew out of her train phase, and as a kid she was incredibly disappointed to find out that the ornate steam locomotives that she’d fallen in love with weren’t actually around much anymore, and so she’d probably never get to ride one.

Touring around a city with a baby is difficult work as it turns out, and by the time they get back to the house, Raven just wants to collapse on the kitchen floor and never move again.

But sleeping means the possibility of nightmares, which she’s still trying to avoid, and so instead Raven brews some more coffee in Clarke’s fancy Keurig machine, and goads Bellamy into playing super smash brothers with her.

They’re still in the middle of a game when they hear Octavia cry out. But before anyone can ask what happened, she shouts “Clarke, you said you would keep all x-rated drawings of my brother covered!”

Raven and Bellamy glance over at Clarke, filling a glass of water at the kitchen sink. She pauses for a moment and then calls back “Technically, it’s a painting!” 

Octavia is not satisfied with that response.

Raven spends the next few hours caught between catching up with the Blake’s and everything she’s missed in their lives, catching  _ them _ up on her life, and taking hundreds of pictures of Penelope from all different angles, until her phone’s memory is full.

She’s opening up a new text message before she realizes that she doesn’t have Luna’s number, and has no way of sending her the photos.

It shouldn’t be this devastating, should it? She barely  _ knows _ Luna. She doesn’t even know her last name. 

She’s more hung up over Luna than the girl that she dated for two and a half years, and that’s the worst part.

That night Raven’s heading downstairs to get some water, when she hears voices coming from the hall bathroom.

She finds Bellamy and Clarke stationed next to the opened window, smoking. They look over when she opens the door, like they’ve been caught red-handed, and Raven can’t help laughing.

“What, did you guys tell O you quit, or something?”

“No, she knows,” Bellamy says, and they both look a little sheepish now. “It’s just bad for the kid.”

“We are trying to cut back, at least,” Clarke says, and Raven steps inside so she can close the door again.

“Yeah, no judgment here. Can I bum one off you?”

Bellamy gives her a strange look, but hands the pack and lighter over. “Since when do you smoke?”

Raven shrugs and lights her cigarette. It doesn’t taste like blackberries; just smoke. She doesn’t even cough once. “I picked it up recently.”

Clarke has a near-empty glass of wine in one hand, and squints her eyes at her, like she’s trying to puzzle something out. Clarke always makes that face when she’s concentrating. “Why aren’t you sleeping?” she asks. “You didn’t sleep last night, either. And I know it’s not jet-lag, because you took so long getting here.”

Raven shrugs again, but it’s a lot less casual now, and they notice. “I get nightmares,” she admits. “About the crash. Sometimes I scream in my sleep. I don’t want to wake the kid.”

Clarke waves her wine glass at her, meaningfully. “You know what you need to do?” she asks, and then answers herself before anyone else can. “Pre-scream. Just get it all out of your system. Then when you sleep, you just sleep.”

“ _ Pre-scream _ ?” Raven asks, fighting a laugh, but Clarke seems serious.

“I know exactly where to do it, too.”

Apparently both she and Bellamy have been drinking, and so, after Bellamy asks Octavia to look after the sleeping baby, they have to call for a ride.

“There’s an app for that,” Clarke tells them, as Raven chugs some pomegranate Mike’s Hard Lemonade that she found in the fridge, trying to catch up.

Clarke gives the driver an address, and he takes them to the beach.

“Why the  _ beach _ ?” Raven asks, finishing off her second bottle. Or maybe third; numbers have started getting slippery. 

It’s the middle of the night and there isn’t another soul around. Just the sand and some forgotten towels and umbrellas and plastic buckets with torn off handles, and the waves.

Raven breathes in the smell of the salt and the water and she thinks of Luna, and she wants to throw up.

“Why  _ not _ the beach?” Clarke asks, and hiccups. “Now scream!” She waits and when Raven does nothing, she huffs a little. “Like this,” she says, and demonstrates by cupping her hands around her mouth, squinting her eyes shut, and screaming so loud that it echoes back at them across the beach.

Bellamy starts laughing and then throws his head back and howls.

Raven stares between the both of them, and her chest feels all locked up like a safe that she forgot the combination to. She just knows that if she opens her mouth now, nothing will come out.

“Just let it out, Raven,” Clarke says, and Raven closes her eyes.

She thinks about everything that’s crashed against her like waves, recently. She thinks about the accident, about the nightmares, about Finn and Gina and she thinks about Luna, Luna, Luna. 

Luna, with her perfect hair and skin that felt like every good thing that Raven was never allowed to have. Luna with her eyes like moonlight and lips that tasted like blackberry and smoke.

Raven screams out into the night, and the night screams back.

She empties out all of those thoughts, every memory, all of the anxiety that’s been building up inside of her like a tower made of wooden blocks and one by one she gives them to the ocean, to wash away at sea.

Raven screams and screams until her throat is sore, until her voice goes hoarse and then finally fades out, and then she’s left with the quiet.

“Fuck,” Bellamy says, and Clarke giggles so hard she falls over. 

Bellamy leans a hand down to help her up, but she pulls him down with her instead, and he decides to just lay there half in her lap. Raven watches them for a moment before flopping down beside them, laying straight back on the sand, cool and firm beneath her. 

“I met someone,” she says, closing her eyes. The stars are starting to spin. “While I was hitchhiking. She picked me up, and we spent the last week and a half together. That’s why I took so long.”

“Where is she?” Clarke asks, running her fingers through Bellamy’s hair.

“I don’t know,” Raven admits. “California, I think, but I don’t know for sure. I don’t know much about her.”

“Did she make you happy?” Bellamy asks, and Raven looks at him. Looks at both of them, and she’s seen them like this, of course she has, but it was years ago, before California and the house and the baby. They always looked like this; like they fit together.

Maybe not so much has changed as she thought.

“Yes,” she sighs, and turns away. It hurts to look at them, knowing that she doesn’t have that. Knowing that she might not ever have it, not after Gina, who she fit with until she didn’t, and not after Luna, who she might have fit with if she’d only stayed.

“Then what else is there to know?”

Raven snorts. “Stop being so sentimental, Blake. There’s a  _ lot _ else to know! What if she’s a serial killer?”

“Depends,” Bellamy says. “Is she a hot serial killer?”

“Who does she kill?” Clarke asks. “Is it like, murdering innocent people for their skin? Or more of a Dexter scenario?”

“Guys, drop the serial killer hypothetical,” Raven groans. “It was hypothetical!”

“You brought it up,” Bellamy points out, and then they’re all lying down on their backs, staring up at the stars, and it’s college all over again.

“Why did you guys get married?” Raven wonders. She’s always wondered, ever since Bellamy first proposed, just six months after they started dating, but she’s never asked. She just figured they knew what they were doing.

“When we first met, we spent so much time bickering, wasting months that we could have been friends,” Bellamy says. “So when we finally got our shit together--”

“When  _ you _ finally got  _ your _ shit together, and asked me on a date,” Clarke corrects, and Bellamy headbutts her in the thigh.

“Anyway, when we finally started dating, I realized that I didn’t want to do that again. I didn’t want to waste anymore time, that I could spend being married to her.”

“It was inevitable,” Clarke agrees, brushing the hair from his forehead so she can lean down and press a kiss there, making his glasses go crooked. Then she sits up and looks over at Raven, seriously. “Please don’t ask the serial killer to marry you.”

“Only if she makes you happy,” Bellamy compromises, and Raven throws a handful of sand at them, but misses her mark.

Clarke uses the same app to call them a ride home, in the early hours of the morning. Raven’s honestly surprised that anyone shows up; getting a call to show up at some closed, abandoned beach in the middle of the night sounds like the start of a True Crime episode. 

But soon enough a blue minivan arrives, and she falls asleep on the way back to the house, only half waking up as Bellamy carries her up to the guest bed. She’s asleep again by the time he sets her down, and she doesn’t wake until late in the morning.

They spend Saturday at the zoo, and Octavia comes with them this time, because apparently she has a thing for zoos and never passes up an opportunity to visit one. 

Generally speaking, Raven can take or leave them, but she has a lot of fun watching Penelope react to all the different animals, clapping for the otters and  _ oohing _ for the zebras and  _ ahhing _ for the polar bears and shrieking when a tiger roars. She’s going to have to start deleting some of her gaming apps, to make room for the growing collection of baby pictures on her phone.

They stop by the gift shop, where Octavia buys a long stuffed snake that she wraps around her neck like a scarf, and Bellamy gets Penelope one of those puffy stuffed seal pups. Raven’s planning to just buy maybe a keychain or something as generic and cheap, when she spies the collection of little tin mood rings set out in a bin by the register.

There’s one that catches her eye; it’s round and bulbous and shimmery silver; it reminds her of the moon. It reminds her of Luna, and she buys it, because she’s weak.

“What the fuck,” she says to herself, even as she slips the ring onto her finger, and watches it turn purple. What does purple mean? She’ll have to consult the little color-code pamphlet. 

It means  _ regretful _ , which sounds about right. Raven keeps the ring on the windowsill by her bed, next to Finn’s necklace. She tries not to think about what that means.

She lets herself be distracted by life at the Blakes’--babysitting Penelope and helping Clarke string up rows of paint-filled balloons on a tapestry outside, that they throw darts at so they explode in starbursts of color. Octavia is working at a coffee shop, and she refuses to let anyone make their own coffee anymore, choosing instead to experiment with foam art and different syrup combinations, so that they never get the same drink twice. Bellamy sometimes has Raven help him grade his students’ essays, but stops once he realizes she’s giving extra marks to anyone who makes a pop culture reference, just because she knows it’ll piss him off.

She still finds herself thinking of Luna when she’s not careful--she’ll take a picture that she wants to show her, or she’ll see something funny that she thinks she might like, or she’ll see a cloud of auburn hair at the supermarket and whirl around so quick that her neck cracks. She’ll think about those blackberry cigarillos and the smell of salt in her hair, and wonder if she’s in the ocean somewhere, looking like someone’s dream.

It had been a good dream, but now this was Raven’s reality; a house filled with friends, and a plump baby that likes to gnaw on her ponytail. Raven might have been happy to travel the country with Luna in her rust bucket truck, but how long would that have lasted? What would have happened next?

Luna was a bridge in a storm, a brief second of shelter and safety and peace. But eventually you always had to come out on the other side.

And now here she is, sleeping through the night, looking at her reflection without scorn in her eyes, eating vegetables because Bellamy’s on a health kick and his mother hen tendencies are in overdrive, which means Clarke and Octavia have to sneak in their junk food while he’s at work and they sit on the couch and binge shitty reality television shows. 

She isn’t perfect. She isn’t  _ fixed _ \--but she’s getting better, everyday. And that really is all you can ask for.

Raven’s been staying with the Blake’s for just over a month, when Clarke brings Luna up again.

“I just want to know what she was like,” she says, and Raven wonders how long she’s been reigning herself in, trying to keep from asking. Being nosy is Clarke’s natural disposition. 

“She was,” Raven hesitates, trying to think of a way to describe her. She hasn’t been thinking about Luna as regularly as she did at first, instead preoccupying herself with Penelope, or settling into life on the west coast. But she does dream about her; brown skin and thin tattoos and auburn curls have replaced crumpled metal and ice and freezing water. Raven’s dreams now are soft and all lit up, trails of warm kisses down her spine as Luna murmurs  _ I forgive you _ into her skin. She always wakes up disappointed in the morning. “Like art. Just, the way she moved, the way she looked, she was beautiful every second. And she made you think, just by looking at her.”

“And you think she’s in California?” Bellamy asks, because Bellamy always manages to become a part of the conversation eventually. 

“It’s where she said she was going,” Raven confirms. He pulls a pitcher of orange juice from the fridge, and seems to be very seriously considering making mimosas at eleven in the morning on a Sunday.

“Okay but what was the sex like?” Clarke asks, waggling her eyebrows. “Good? Great? Mind-blowing?”

Raven smirks. “All of the above.”

Bellamy seems affronted. “Wait, better than  _ me _ ?”

“Bellamy we had hate sex  _ once _ while we both had feelings for other people,” Raven makes a face at him. “Yes, of course it was better than you.”

He makes a show of looking betrayed, and she ignores him.

“Do you have any pictures?” Clarke asks, leaning over on the counter as Raven picks up her phone. She has to scroll for ages, through all the pictures of Penelope, but eventually  _ there _ , there are the few from her trip through Utah and Nevada, that she couldn’t bear to delete. 

She lands on one that shows Luna sitting at the table in their hotel room, eating fruit from a bowl while she concentrates on the crossword, one long leg propped up against her chest on the chair, wearing nothing but Raven’s t-shirt, and her bedhead. She tilts the screen so Clarke can see, and she lets out a low whistle.

“Wait, I want to see,” Bellamy says, dancing over to look over his wife’s shoulder. He lets out a lower whistle, and reaches over to high five Raven. “Good job.”

“Thanks,” she says, dry. “She was really great.”

“Who was really great?” Octavia asks, wandering in with some enormous man Raven’s never seen before, trailing after her. “Is it me? Because if so, yes, you’re right.”

Raven rolls her eyes, but Bellamy answers for her.

“Don’t be such a brat. We’re talking about the girl Raven hooked up with while she was finding herself in the American southwest.”

“ _ Ohhh _ ,” Octavia coos, delighted. She thrives on drama. “What’s she look like?”

Raven hands over her phone for O to study, and then reaches to take it back, but then Octavia’s friend interrupts them.

“That’s my cousin,” he says, looking at the photo. “Luna.”

Raven’s eyes go wide and she glances from him to Octavia, to Bellamy and Clarke, and then back to him. Octavia looks like she’s just won the lottery. 

“Sorry,” Raven says, “But who are you?”

“This is my boyfriend Lincoln,” Octavia chirps, and Raven frowns. She’s met Octavia’s girlfriend, a pretty blonde named Niylah. She didn’t take O for the cheating type. “What?”

“I just,” Raven falters, thoughts still swimming from Lincoln’s announcement, and unsure if she should point out the fact that Octavia is cheating on him. “What about Niylah?”

Octavia smirks. “She’s my girlfriend. Lincoln’s my boyfriend. It’s not that deep.”

Bellamy heaves the sigh of a long-suffering brother. “It kind of is,” he says, and turns to Lincoln. “You said that she’s your cousin?”

“So you know where she lives?” Clarke asks, and every nerve in Raven’s body goes electric as she waits for his answer.

“Yes,” he says, but he looks a little uncertain about it. “Luna is a very private person,” he says, and Raven supposes it makes sense that he wouldn’t want to bring just  _ anyone _ to his cousin’s home. 

“I met her on my way here,” Raven tells him. “And I didn’t leave under the best circumstances. I just want to see her and apologize.”

“And maybe bang it out,” Clarke fake-coughs, and Raven throws a pen at her.

Lincoln still doesn’t look totally convinced. “Please,” Raven adds, and she must look desperate enough, because he agrees.

He tries to apologize to Octavia--apparently they’d had a brunch date planned for that morning--but she assures him that this is more important, and practically shoves him out the door.

“Are you kidding?” she asks him. “You’re the last-minute driver in the rom-com! It’s a very important role!”

Raven woke up that morning with Luna’s phantom arms around her; now she’s scrambling into Lincoln’s Jeep Cherokee to go see her for the first time in a month. She thinks about what Bellamy said on that beach.  _ I didn’t want to waste anymore time _ . How much time has she already wasted?

What if she doesn’t want to see Raven? What if she never forgave her, and still hates her for leaving? 

She shouldn’t just  _ show up _ randomly with Luna’s cousin, right? That would be strange, even for her. Should she write a speech? A letter? Beg her forgiveness? Grab a boombox? Shouldn’t she have some sort of grand gesture, to show how sorry is, and convince Luna to give her another chance? Raven was the one that left in the middle of the night; she should definitely have a grand gesture, just in case.

The drive is less than an hour, but Raven still thinks it might be a real possibility that she might just die before they get there. Everything inside her is buzzing and burning and every other transitive verb she can think of.

It just feels so surreal; what are the odds that she would meet Luna’s cousin, and through him find a way to see her again?

Probably about the same as the odds of seeing a mattress at a garage sale as they drive down the block.

“Hey, so I know we’ve known each other for less than a day,” she tells Lincoln, “But I’m gonna need a weird favor.”

Raven hasn’t believed in soul mates since she was a girl whose  _ soul mate _ decided to cheat on her the first chance he got. She isn’t a romantic, or at least doesn’t consider herself to be one, not recently.

But she is a scientist, and she remembers reading about the Quantum Entanglement Theory, wherein one atomic particle in one place could be doing something, and another matching particle would react to it from across the world, because those two particles were meant to be together but had been separated, and would gradually grow closer to one another over time until they were together again.

If Raven was a romantic, she might say that that sounds an awful lot like soul mates.

If Raven was a romantic, she might say that that sounds an awful lot like two people who managed to find each other on the side of a road, only to be separated and then brought back together again some time later, by a chance meeting.

If she was a romantic, she might think this _ meant _ something.

Luna doesn’t live in Sacramento but around forty minutes out, directly on the coastline. 

Lincoln pulls up the drive of a lighthouse that’s been converted into a regular house, looking like the cover of an HGTV magazine, and Raven stares up at it from the passenger seat, suddenly paralyzed.

“Are you going to get out?” Lincoln asks, kindly. Raven doesn’t look away from the lighthouse, particularly the front door, waiting for her to step outside at any moment.

“Yes,” she decides, and at least she’s no longer talking to her reflection, these days. Raven steps out of the car.

She takes two steps towards the door, before she can think better of it, and then suddenly it opens, and Luna is standing in the entrance, looking out at her. She’s more bundled up than Raven’s ever seen her, in an oversized sweater and a pair of thin jeans, but the wind is wrestling with her hair and she still looks so perfect that it makes Raven ache.

“Hey,” she says, lamely, and Luna looks at her, unimpressed.

“Raven,” she sighs. “What are you doing here?” She glances at Lincoln and then back at Raven.

“I think I’ll just go pour myself some tea,” Lincoln announces to no one, and steps past Luna into the lighthouse. 

“I’m sorry,” Raven says, unsure what else to tell her. She should have written a speech, and rehearsed it on the ride over. She’s so unprepared, and Raven Reyes is  _ never _ unprepared. 

Luna raises a brow at her. “For what?”

“Everything,” she says. “I’m sorry that I didn’t ever get you flowers, or hold your hand, or tell you how you’re so beautiful you make my chest hurt. And I’m sorry that I didn’t go down on you for  _ hours _ , or fix your truck for good, or tell you that,” she takes a breath, the words falling out of her mouth at rapid-fire, unable to stop or pace herself. Luna looks stricken, but doesn’t say a thing. “For so long, it felt like everything was just pouring down on me all at once, and then suddenly you were there, and everything  _ stopped _ and I could breathe and I wanted that more than anything, but I got scared. And I’m sorry that I freaked out, and ran away. I’m sorry that I left. I’m sorry that I didn’t stay in bed with you forever.”

“Raven,” Luna starts, but Raven cuts her off, marching around the back of Lincoln’s Jeep.

“I got you something,” she says, and opens the trunk so Luna can see.

Luna looks, and laughs.  _ “Really _ ?”

“Really,” Raven says, dragging out the mattress so it lands on the slate-stone drive. “You stole the last one, so I figured it was my turn. We can go on another road trip, if you want.”

She looks charmed, in spite of herself. “What if it rains again?”

Raven shrugs. “We’ll steal another one. We can be the Bonnie and Clyde of motel mattresses.”

Luna smiles, slow and wide, and Raven waits. Finally, she says “Do you want some tea?”

Raven closes her eyes, just for a second, and feels the world start to still again, so she can breathe. “Yeah,” she says, following her inside. “Tea sounds nice.”


End file.
